


Coming Back from the Edge of Town

by Rainne



Series: Bucky vs. the 21st Century [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Fix-It of Sorts, Fluff and Humor, Gen, Recovery from trauma, Social Media, Some Plot, Thaddeus Ross is an asshole, background Steve/Sam, bucky barnes gets an instagram, some civil war plot points
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-14
Updated: 2019-06-22
Packaged: 2020-05-07 20:01:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 20,879
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19216507
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rainne/pseuds/Rainne
Summary: Bucky comes home after the events ofThe Winter Soldier. He gets an Instagram and starts trying to recover. Then some guy called Zemo shows up and everything kind of goes sideways.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> It's been a long time, dear readers! I hope you haven't forgotten about me. 
> 
> I'd like to thank the usual suspects - secondalto and citymusings - for beta reading, cheering me on, and listening to me whine about unexpected plot points in the middle of the night. You guys are the best.

All Steve wanted was to get home, take a shower, and curl up in bed with Sam’s arms around him. Yet another trip to look for Bucky had ended in yet another disappointment, and Steve was getting close to the point of giving up. Would it be so bad to just stop, he wondered, and let Bucky have his own way? Clearly he didn’t want to be found - maybe Sam had been right weeks ago when he suggested that Bucky might just need space to clear his head and figure himself out, and that Bucky might come back on his own.

With a heavy sigh, Steve clambered out of the airport taxi and hefted his duffel bag, turning toward the steps of the Brooklyn brownstone he was now sharing with Sam (since both of them were pretty much persona non grata in Washington these days). With Sam just behind him, he trudged up the steps and unlocked the door, stepping inside and stopping right inside the door.

The television was on.

He could hear it playing from the living room - it sounded like _Jeopardy!_ \- but he knew full well that the television had been off when he and Sam left. When he glanced back, he knew that Sam heard it, too. They both unshouldered their bags, setting them silently on the floor. Steve pulled his shield out of its case, and Sam retrieved a Glock from the underside of the foyer table. On silent feet, they crept toward the living room door - only to stop about a foot away from the opening when a quiet, rough voice said, “I let myself in. I hope you don’t mind. There’s dinner in the oven if you’re hungry.”

Steve stood, his shield falling to his side, and stepped forward into the living room doorway. There, undeniable, sat Bucky Barnes on the sofa. He was scruffy but clean, his damp hair testifying to a recent shower, and he was dressed in a pair of Steve’s track pants and one of Steve’s sweatshirts. The looseness of the garments, as well as the thinness of his face, indicated that he hadn’t eaten well in some time, but he looked otherwise healthy - healthier, even, than he had been when Steve fought him on the helicarrier.

“Hey, Buck,” Steve said softly.

“Hey, Stevie,” Bucky replied, just as softly.

“Well, now that we’ve gotten that out of the way,” Sam interjected, tucking the gun into the back of his waistband and pushing past Steve into the living room, “and not that I’m not glad we’re apparently done traveling the world looking for you, but how long have you been here?”

“Here in the house, about a day,” Bucky admitted. “In New York, about a week. There was work in Queens.”

 _Work_ could only mean one thing: HYDRA. Steve and Sam had been tracking Bucky by the smoking holes he was leaving behind in various places that always turned out afterward to have been HYDRA strongholds, but they had not heard about one in Queens. “You left it standing?” Sam asked, a little surprised.

Bucky shrugged. “Hard to safely blow shit sky-high when it’s five hundred yards from an elementary school.”

“Fair,” Sam allowed.

“You knew we’d be here,” Steve said suddenly. “Today. You knew we were coming home.”

Bucky nodded. “I knew you were behind me. I figured when I didn’t make any noise in Queens, you’d come home for a break.”

“You knew we’d be here _today_ ,” Sam commented, keeping his voice even by sheer force of will.

Bucky seemed to recognize that Sam wasn’t as pleased as Steve was. “I can go,” he offered. “I just need to change clothes.” He started to push himself up off the couch.

“No!” Steve exclaimed. “No, don’t go. Please.” He swallowed hard. “Please don’t go.”

Sam sighed. “No, it’s fine. I’m just... surprised that you knew exactly when to expect us.”

“Wasn’t hard,” Bucky replied, curling in on himself a little bit. “You’ve been about two days behind me the whole time. Cut that down by a day to fly home, and here we are.” He took a deep breath, biting his lip, and then repeated his earlier offer. “There’s dinner, if you’re hungry.”

“Yeah,” Sam said, choosing to accept the olive branch. “Yeah, let’s - let’s do that.” He reached out and tugged on the shield still in Steve’s hand; Steve leaned it against the wall.

“You’ll come eat with us?” Steve asked, looking at Bucky with an almost desperate hunger.

Bucky nodded, unfolding himself from the couch and standing. “Yeah,” he said softly. “Yeah, I’ll come eat.” And he followed them into the kitchen.

~*~

“I don’t actually remember where I was or what I did for the first... I don’t know, two weeks?” Bucky admitted when Sam asked him. They were sitting at the table in the kitchen, eating the surprisingly delicious meat loaf and potatoes that Bucky had produced from the oven. (“I didn’t make it; it came from the diner around the corner.”) Bucky ran a hand through his hair. “I was. Well. They kept me shot up with stuff. I don’t know what it was; they never told me. But I had to spend some time detoxing before I could, you know, be around people.”

Steve made a pained noise, and Sam put his hand on Steve’s arm. “I’m actually not surprised,” Sam admitted. “It’s not uncommon for chemical substances to be used in mind control attempts. Hell, even the U.S. government tried it in the fifties and sixties; sometime when you’re in the mood for a little light horror, look up MK-ULTRA.”

“I’m good,” Bucky replied, a faint, sardonic smile crossing his face.

“I know when you came back to yourself,” Steve said after a moment. “That chemical factory in Ames.”

“Actually, that was my second job. My first one only made the news as an arson.” Bucky shrugged. “It was the bank building where they were holding me in Washington.”

“I saw that!” Sam exclaimed. “They figured it must have been kids in there smoking cigarettes or something.”

“It was not,” Bucky replied. “It was me. I’m just really good at what I do.”

“Did,” Steve interjected.

Both Sam and Bucky turned to Steve, and Bucky cocked an eyebrow. “Come again?”

“Did,” Steve repeated. “You don’t do that stuff any more.”

“I hate to break it to you, Stevie, but I’ve spent the last year and a half doing _that stuff,_ just to different targets.” Bucky shook his head. “Don’t get all starry-eyed on me.”

“I will if I want to,” Steve replied, his face going stubborn. “What you’ve been doing since D.C. is different.”

“Steve,” Sam said carefully, “it’s not really your call to say how Bucky feels about things.”

Bucky blinked at Sam. “Thanks,” he said softly. Then he sighed. “But I guess you could say _did,_ if you want. I’m done.”

“Done?” Sam asked.

Bucky nodded. “I’ve done everything I want to do. If there’s more HYDRA out there, they’re too scared to put their heads up because they know I’ll blow ‘em off. I’ll keep an eye out, you know, but I... I’m done _hunting._ ”

Sam nodded as well. “What’s next for you, then?”

“Well, I don’t actually know,” Bucky replied. He shrugged. “I want to come in, you know? Come home. But I don’t know if I can.”

“Of course you can!” Steve exclaimed, dropping his fork onto his plate. “Why the hell wouldn’t you?”

Bucky stared at Steve flatly. “Well, there’s that whole thing about me being a deeply traumatized ex-soldier with a history of committing war crimes. That might make things _a little complicated._ ”

“Complicated, but not impossible,” Sam said, considering the matter. “Steve, calm down. He’s right.”

“You’re not a _war criminal,_ ” Steve managed, his voice strangled. “You did what you did because you had to, under duress.”

“You think the families of people I killed in D.C. are gonna care about that?” Bucky pointed out.

There was a long moment of silence before Steve said, “Who says we have to tell them?”

Sam and Bucky both stared at Steve. It was Sam who finally spoke. “Run that by me again?”

“Think about it,” Steve said. “There’s no pictures of Bucky from any of the events in D.C. And I don’t think any of the reports said anything that could identify Bucky as being the guy from D.C.”

“There’s the big honkin’ metal arm,” Bucky pointed out, waving the fingers of his left hand.

Steve shook his head. “Yeah, but none of the reports - at least, none of the ones I read - said anything about that.”

“People were too busy screaming and running in terror to notice?” Sam asked. “You know, you could actually be onto something there. We’ll need to double check, maybe ask Stark to get that fancy AI of his onto it, but you could be right, Steve - we might be best off just to brazen it out and see what happens.”

“And if anything _does_ come of it,” Steve added, “we hire the best lawyers money can buy and we go at it that way.”

“You honestly think I can just... walk away from everything I did, ” Bucky said, shaking his head. “They're not going to let me. Honestly, I'm not sure I _can_.”

“You’re dealing with two separate issues here, as I see it,” Sam interjected. “The question of whether you can - whether you’ll be able to legally get off the hook for the actions you took while under duress - and whether you _can_ \- that is, whether you can allow yourself to let go and move on.”  When Bucky nodded, Sam continued. “For the first question, I think Steve is right. We can just try to brazen it out, and if anything happens, we hire you some high powered lawyers and go from there. It’s not like we don’t know a guy with connections.”

Steve snorted. Sam continued. “As for the second question - that’s on you. And I’m going to suggest pretty strongly that you’re going to want to find a trauma therapist before we go much further.” He held up a finger when Steve would have spoken. “I _cannot_ be your therapist. For one thing, your traumas are way above my paygrade; for another, it’s incredibly unethical to be someone’s therapist when they’re also your friend.”

Bucky nodded slowly. “Is that what we are?” he asked. “Friends?”

“We might as well be,” Sam replied. “I’m pretty sure if we don’t agree to it now, Steve’ll just give us the puppy eyes until we _do_.”

Bucky laughed. “You got a point, pal,” he admitted. “You got a hell of a good point.”

~*~

There was never really any question of Bucky staying; he made a pro forma attempt at leaving around ten p.m., but even the strongest man couldn’t hold out against the way Steve’s face pinched up when he was trying not to crumble, and Bucky had always been weak when it came to Steve Rogers. So, it must be said, had Sam. So Bucky was shown to the second bedroom and Steve left him to settle in, heading down the hall to the master.

Sam, behind Steve, leaned briefly against the doorjamb. “You gonna be able to sleep?” he asked.

“Don’t know,” Bucky admitted. “New place, you know.”

Sam nodded. “Will you sleep better if someone keeps watch?”

Bucky gave him a slight smile. “Thanks for the offer, but not really.”

“Let me know if you change your mind.” Sam straightened up. “Get your head down, man,” he said softly. “Fighting’s over.”

Bucky let out a soft huff that might have been a laugh. “Yeah,” he said, but Sam couldn’t tell if it was sarcastic or not. Either way, Bucky sat down on the side of the bed, peeling Steve’s sweatshirt off to reveal a plain black tee underneath.

Sam took hold of the doorknob. “Night, man,” he said. “See you in the morning.”

“Night,” Bucky replied, and Sam shut the door and headed off after Steve.

Steve was sitting on the side of the bed when Sam entered the bedroom, and when he looked up, his face was red and wet. Sam shut the door and came to his side, sitting down and pulling Steve into his arms. “Hey,” he said softly. “Hey, it’s gonna be okay.”

Steve clutched desperately at Sam. “God, how _can_ it be?” he asked, his voice muffled by Sam’s shoulder. “What he’s been through…”

“I know,” Sam said gently, rubbing at Steve’s back. “And let’s be honest, whatever you’re imagining he went through, the reality is probably at least ten times worse. But Steve.” Sam pushed Steve back so he could look into Steve’s eyes. “He’s _here_ now. He’s come in from the cold - and he did it of his own volition, not because we were chasing him down. He came because he wanted to come. That’s not nothing.”

Steve nodded, wiping at his face. “No, you’re right,” he admitted. “It’s not nothing. It’s a whole lot of not-nothing.” He took a deep, shuddering breath. “I don’t wanna fuck this up,” he admitted, “and I’m so fucking scared that I will.”

“You might,” Sam agreed. Off Steve’s stricken look, he continued, repeating himself ruthlessly. “You might. Or I might. Or Bucky might. But Steve, as long as he understands we’re here for him and we’re not gonna push him to do things he doesn’t want to do or isn’t ready for…”

Steve nodded. “It’ll work out?”

“Well, it might or it might not,” Sam temporized. “But the important thing is that we’re all gonna do our best, and that’s all we _can_ do. And you have to remember, too, that recovery isn’t a straight line. There’s gonna be good days and bad days - for all three of us. We just gotta put our heads together and weather the storms.”

Steve nodded. Then he gave Sam a slight, crooked grin. “How’d you get so smart?”

“Training,” Sam replied, laughing softly. “But that reminds me - what I said to Bucky about not being his therapist goes double for you. You gotta find one, man.”

“Can you help me do that, at least?” Steve asked. “I don’t even know where to start.”

“Yeah,” Sam said, nodding. “Yeah, I can do that.” He reached up and wiped at the dampness under Steve’s eye with his thumb. “Come on,” he said softly. “Let’s get a shower and get some shuteye.”

“Yeah, okay,” Steve said, standing up and stripping his shirt off. “That sounds good.”


	2. Chapter 2

One of the first things Bucky really noticed about their surroundings, when he stopped focusing on threats and started really paying attention to the environment, was the cats. Every alley has a cat, especially in New York; there’s rats everywhere, and for a cat, that’s a banquet waiting to happen. But Bucky noticed that their alley seemed to have more cats than most - in fact, there seemed to be a great number of cats who very much enjoyed basking in a sunny patch right up against the next building, where someone had built a very small garden box that seemed to be full of weeds.

“Hey Sam,” Bucky said one day, staring out the living room window, “you ever notice all these cats?”

“Yeah,” Sam replied from the couch, where he was reading a book. “They love that weedy ass flower bed for some reason.”

“Hmm,” Bucky said thoughtfully. “Gets good sun,” he commented. “Cats love sunny spots.”

“And boxes,” Sam agreed. “Hey, check this out.” He set his book aside and pulled his phone out. After tapping at the screen for a minute, he held it out to Bucky. Bucky took it and watched a YouTube video of a lion curling up inside a huge cardboard box. “Cats, man,” Sam said.

Bucky laughed. “All you need to catch a cat is a box and a sunny spot.”

“Right?” Sam said, taking his phone back. “That’s why I got no respect for people that go on safari and ‘hunt’ a lion.” He used sarcastic air quotes around the word _hunt._ “All you gotta do is roll up on one. They’re _cats,_ for fuck’s sake.”

“People suck,” Bucky agreed, returning to the window and staring down at the cats.

Sam raised an eyebrow. “You want a cat, Bucky?” he asked, curious.

“No.” Bucky shook his head. “I’m barely responsible for myself right now; I can’t be responsible for a pet.”

“Fair enough.” Sam replied. “You change your mind, speak up; I don’t mind a cat and I don’t think Steve would either.”

“Nah, Steve likes cats. He used to feed the alley cats when there was scraps and stuff.” Bucky ran a hand through his hair. Then he shook his head irritably. “I need a haircut.”

“I wasn’t gonna say anything,” Sam said, grinning. Bucky gave him the finger. “Seriously though,” Sam continued, “are you gonna be okay with letting somebody around your head?”

“Don’t know,” Bucky admitted. “Maybe not. Might have to do it myself.”

“God, don’t do that,” Sam told him. “I can do it. It won’t be great, but it’ll be better than anything you’d do on your own.”

Bucky laughed. “We’ll see.” He turned away from the window. “I’m gonna go take a walk.”

“All right,” Sam said, picking up his book again. “See you when you get back.”

When Bucky returned, carrying a bag over his shoulder, he met Steve in front of the house. Steve climbed off his bike and cocked an eyebrow at Bucky. “Whatcha got there, Buck?”

“Cat food,” Bucky replied.

“We get a cat I don’t know about?” Steve asked, a little surprised.

“Nah. ‘S for the alley cats. There’s a ton of them, you ever notice?”

Steve nodded. “Yeah, they hang out in the catnip garden.”

Bucky blinked. “Catnip?”

“Yeah. That weedy looking patch? I asked Mr. Thornton and he said it’s catnip.”

“Well, that explains everything,” Bucky said. Then he shrugged. “I got cat food anyway.”

“No, that’s good, we can feed the cats,” Steve said. Then he gave Bucky a crooked grin. “You remember how -”

“You were always feeding your scraps to the alley cats? Yeah, I remember.” He aimed a playful cuff at the side of Steve’s head before turning and leading the way up the stoop to the front door. “Idiot. Always giving away your own food instead of eating it like you were supposed to.”

“Well, they were hungry!” Steve exclaimed.

“So were you, dumbass,” Bucky replied, laughing. “You know, you mighta been less skinny if you’d eaten all your damn food.”

Steve laughed as well, following Bucky inside. “Yeah, well, look at me now.”

“You ain’t changed,” Sam called from the couch. “You’re still just as much of an asshole now as you ever were.”

“How would you know?” Steve demanded, grinning.

“You think me and Bucky don’t talk? I’ve heard _all_ the stories.”

Bucky snorted. “You ain’t heard a quarter of the stories,” he replied. “We’ve barely scratched the surface. Hell, I ain’t even told you about the time there was a block fight, the Irish against the Germans, and Steve nearly busted Horst Mueller’s brains in with a half-brick.”

Sam’s eyes got huge. “What?”

So Bucky put the cat food in the corner of the kitchen and came back to the living room, flopping down in the armchair while Steve cuddled up to Sam on the sofa. “Used to be there was a lot of division between the - whatdoyoucallems. What’s the word now? Ethnicities?”

“Yeah,” Sam nodded.

“Right. So yeah. The Irish hated the Germans, and the Germans hated us right back, and so every so often there’d be a block fight. Somebody’d instigate something and the next thing you’d know, a riot was breaking out. I usually tried to drag this little asshole out of them so he didn’t get killed, but this one time, Horst Mueller called me a chickenshit mick and so Steve, little ten-pound Steve, picks up a half-brick and slings it right at Mueller’s head.”

“Well I wasn’t gonna let him get away with that, was I?” Steve asked, his voice mild. “Nobody calls you a chickenshit mick except me.”

“Yeah, so’s your old man,” Bucky replied easily. “Anyway, Mueller was down for the count after that, but swinging like that made Steve a target, you know, instead of a bystander like he coulda been if he’d got out of the fracas.”

“So what did you do?” Sam asked.

Bucky laughed. “Only thing I could do. I got him in a headlock and dragged him off down an alley.”

Steve laughed along with Sam, rubbing at his throat. “I can still feel your elbow, right here,” he said.

“Good,” Bucky replied. “Maybe that’ll remind you to stop being such a moron. Oh, wait, apparently not.”

“I’m not the one who brought home a thirty-pound sack of cat food for the alley cats,” Steve reminded him, grinning.

“Is that what that was?” Sam asked. “I saw you carrying something.”

“Yeah - Steve says that weedy patch is actually catnip, so I figure if whoever’s growing it is getting them high, I can at least offer snacks.”

Sam and Steve both laughed, and Sam said, “That sounds real hospitable of you, Bucky. Nice job.”

Bucky smirked a little, then turned in his chair, swinging his legs over the arm. He leaned over and grabbed the television remote, flicking it on. “Who wants to watch nature documentaries?”

~*~

What happened next, Steve blamed on Sam. It was Sam’s lion-in-a-box video that got Bucky interested in YouTube, and he started hunting up the best videos he could find. Over the course of about two weeks, Steve and Sam were both subjected to regular offerings of Vine compilations, cat and dog videos, and kid videos - but there were also things like a guy cooking mushrooms while wearing a horse head, a woman massaging an opossum, and even one of a man dismembering a mannequin for, presumably, unspeakable purposes.

And then Bucky discovered dashcam videos.

It only took a few days for Sam and Steve to both become desensitized to the sound of Bucky reacting to such videos, but about five days into the obsession, Sam was getting tired of hearing it.

“Ooh, shit,” Bucky said.

Sam, sighing, ignored him. Instead of reacting, he unearthed a box of cornbread mix from the freezer.

“Ooh,” Bucky said. Then, a minute later, “Ouch.” A minute or so after that, he said, “You dumb fuck.” And then, “Holy _shit!_ ”

“Dude,” Sam said, leaning around the counter to eyeball Bucky through the pass-through. “You need a hobby. Watching those videos cannot be good for you.”

“But Sam,” Bucky replied, looking up from his tablet with wide, innocent eyes. “They’re such a good warning about the dangers of unsafe driving!”

“I swear to God I’m gonna send you to a summer camp,” Sam threatened. “You’re gonna do fucking _crafts_ and shit and you’re gonna _like it_.”

Bucky chuckled, setting the tablet aside. “Come on, you know those videos are hella entertaining.”

“Please never say the word _hella_ to me again,” Sam said, looking and feeling pained. “I will grant, though, that some of them are entertaining.”

“I saw one earlier today where the car went completely airborne and basically bounced off the top of a tunnel.”

Sam, who had been about to go back to his cornbread mix, paused and turned back to face Bucky again. “How long have you been watching those videos?” he asked, suspicious.

“Uh.” Bucky looked over at the clock, then back at Sam, then back at the clock again.

“That’s it,” Sam said. “No more screen time. You need a _hobby._ ”

Bucky snorted but reached over and turned the tablet off anyway. “Yeah, a hobby,” he said. “What ‘m I gonna do, show up at the sewing circle with my embroidery? Have a little stitch-n-bitch?”

“You could, if you wanted to,” Sam replied easily. He cracked an egg into the mix. “Or you could do something else. What are you into?”

Bucky shrugged diffidently. “I dunno.”

“Well,” Sam said, “do what every self-respecting housewife does. Start with Pinterest.”

~*~

Bucky finally took Sam’s advice on a long, boring day about a week after that. He’d finally gotten sick of car crash videos and cat videos weren’t doing it and everything on television was dumb. There was nothing on the shelf he wanted to read and too much choice on the library website - he couldn’t make a decision. So, grouchy and out-of-sorts, he’d made coffee and stood at the living room window to watch the alley cats go from the catnip to the food and back again.

“Go on Pinterest, he said,” Bucky grumbled to himself. “It’ll be fun, he said. You’ll find good stuff, he said.” But the overwhelming amount of information available there had been neither fun nor good. Sometimes, the Internet was not an improvement.

One thing that _had_ improved since the last time he’d had it: future coffee was _amazing._

Bucky sighed. The sun was shining, birds were singing... and he was inside, grumbling at a pack of cats that didn’t even know he was there. Quite suddenly (and a bit unfairly), he resented everything about his life. He stared down into his coffee mug and then shrugged. “Fuck it.” Carrying the mug back into the kitchen, he placed it in the sink. Then he turned off the coffee machine and went upstairs to change clothes.

When he came back down, he was wearing comfy jeans and a soft t-shirt covered with a light flannel. He pushed his feet into the sneakers in the shoe pile by the door - they were probably Steve’s sneakers, but Bucky didn’t care - and grabbed his phone before heading out into the sunshine.

There was a coffee shop down the block from their brownstone; it was just as twee as every other hipster-focused coffee shop in Brooklyn but the coffee was good, so Bucky headed that direction. Once there, he ordered a mocha frappe to go, carrying it to the nearby park. There, he planted himself on a bench, still grumpy but at least now grumpy in the sunshine, which was an improvement. He sipped at his frappe for a few minutes before deciding to try again.

He opened his phone and navigated to Pinterest.

After a frustrating few minutes that involved _downloading the app for fuck’s sake why can’t I just look at it on my browser, fuck you Pinterest,_ he finally managed to reach what looked like some variety of main page. He found a search bar, typed in the word “hobbies,” and hit the little magnifying glass.

A moment later, he was just as overwhelmed as he’d been at home - but, again, overwhelmed in the sunshine was still an improvement. He took a deep breath and started scrolling, reading headlines and flicking past them if they didn’t immediately engender his interest. Finally he found one that looked interesting: “50 Fun Hobbies to Include in Your Self-Care Routine.” Well, Bucky’s new therapist had been making noises at him that sounded like _self-care,_ so Bucky shrugged and clicked the link.

Offhand, he couldn’t think of anything he could blog or podcast about, unless people would be interested in a blog or podcast about HYDRA and recovery from seventy years therein; crocheting and knitting were right out (he was afraid he’d break the needles); singing or acting - no way. But then a word caught his eye. _Photography._

He considered this. Photography was easy. All you had to do was take pictures of things. Hell, you didn’t even need to buy a camera any more (though he thought he remembered that Becca had had a Brownie once upon a time); there was a really good camera built right into your damn phone. All you needed was something to take a picture of and any idiot could do photography.

But wait - didn’t people do things with their pictures these days? Share them online and stuff? He frowned, looking at his phone and taking a long pull off his frappe. But he only had to frown for a minute, as a shadow began to approach him, a little tentative. “Excuse me, mister?” a young girl’s voice said in an accent that was clearly Not From New York.

Bucky looked up. There were three of them, about thirteen or fourteen, and one of them was _holding out her phone._ “Could you take a picture of us, please?” she asked him.

“You bet,” Bucky replied, smiling, and took the phone. The girl darted back to sling her arms around her friends’ shoulders, and Bucky framed the photo carefully, taking a few just to be on the safe side. Then he held the phone out. “There you go.”

“Thanks, mister,” the girl said, taking it back.

“For posting online, yeah?” he asked. “Showing your pals back home?”

The girl laughed. “Yeah,” she agreed. “And all my Instagram followers, too.” She tucked the phone into her pocket. “Thanks again!” she said, and the girls fluttered away down the walking path.

“Instagram,” Bucky said thoughtfully. Then again, “Instagram.”

With a swipe of his thumb, he opened his own phone and navigated to the app store.

His first photo was of his left hand. It felt... appropriate, somehow.

Before he posted it, though, he did some light googling. First he googled _how to use instagram._ Then he googled _what is a hashtag_ and then _how to use hashtags._ Then he googled _how to get instagram followers._

The picture turned out really good; the grass behind his hand was nicely unfocused, leaving the hand itself perfectly sharp, and Bucky was pleased with it. He labeled it #prosthetics, and he posted it.

Within an hour, he had three new followers. One of them was a veteran who’d lost both legs to an IED, one was a cancer survivor, and one an individual who was born with only one arm. He followed all three of them back.


	3. Chapter 3

They had three months of quiet to settle in, get used to one another, and build a stable routine. Sam reached out to his network at the VA and outside of it and was able to help both Steve and Bucky find therapists of their own. They had three months of almost idyllic peace, during which time Bucky began building a solid Instagram following and Steve started reading manga and trying to learn the art style and Sam convinced his mother to give him copies of some of her most popular recipes so he could practice cooking them.

And then a kid with a cell phone blew it for them.

_Saw @Steve_Rogers picking up somebody in Midtown today,_ the tweet read. _Anybody else think this guy is a dead ringer for Bucky Barnes?_ Attached was a photo - a very good photo, unfortunately - of Bucky, his hair newly shorn, clambering onto the back of Steve’s bike.

“Well,” said Steve, looking at the tweet on the television screen. It had gone viral, and was being featured on one of the morning soft-news talk shows. “Shit.”

“Yeah,” Bucky agreed.

Steve’s phone rang, and he sighed. “That’ll probably be the PR people; they’re going to want us to make some kind of statement.” He looked over at Bucky. “You ready to go public?”

“Might as well,” Bucky replied. “I mean, we’re pretty much busted as it is.”

Steve nodded, pulling his phone out and checking the screen. Then he swiped with his thumb. “Pepper, hi,” he said. “I guess you saw the tweet.”

“I did,” Pepper replied. “You’re going to have to make a statement.”

“Yeah,” Steve agreed, nodding even though she couldn’t see him. “We’re ready to do that. We’ll need time to prep something, though. I have no idea what to even say.”

“I’ll have Mindy put something together for you,” Pepper said. “How much information do you want to share?”

Steve chewed his lip for a moment, thinking. “As little as possible,” he admitted. “We want to acknowledge that Bucky is Bucky, and we want to explain that he was a prisoner of HYDRA, but if we can avoid getting into specifics and so on...”

“Of course,” Pepper replied. “I’ll get Mindy on this right away; we’ll have a statement to release by this afternoon. Which of the shows do you want to go on tomorrow, and will Bucky be going on with you?”

“I, uh. Is that necessary?”

“It... isn’t _not_ necessary,” Pepper said carefully. “Just a plain statement isn’t really going to satisfy the masses, and it’s really best to get your side out as fast as possible and with as much of a human face on it as possible.”

“Okay,” Steve said, taking a long breath. “Which one do you suggest?”

The next morning found Steve and Bucky standing in the green room of _Good Morning America_ , waiting nervously to be called onto the set. Steve was pacing; Bucky had gone preternaturally still in a chair, a thousand-yard sniper stare on his face. Both of them startled when the door opened, and the young intern who’d come to fetch them flinched back just a little. “Captain Rogers, Sergeant Barnes, they’re ready for you.”

Bucky stood, grabbing Steve by the arm. “C’mere,” he said. “Your tie’s crooked.” He fixed it, then smoothed down the front of Steve’s nice blue button-up. “Okay. You look good. How about me, do I pass muster?”

Steve smiled, tugging on the shoulder of Bucky’s own green-and-white plaid shirt. “You look fine,” he said. “C’mon, let’s get out there and do this.”

“On your six, Cap,” Bucky replied, grinning.

They were led onto the set and seated beside the interviewer, an attractive Black woman who introduced herself as Robin. The three of them made small talk until a man offstage with a clipboard began making arcane signals with his hands; then there was a call of something that Bucky didn’t quite catch, and then Robin was straightening in her chair and introducing them to the studio and TV audiences.

Though Robin was as gentle as possible, the interview was still grueling. On a good day, Bucky didn’t much like talking about what had happened to him to Steve or Sam, much less his therapist - talking about it to a stranger in front of an audience of millions was a nightmare. But what choice did he have? So he told what he could: he knew he’d fallen off the train, though he had no memory of the event; he knew he’d been collected by some Soviet soldiers, but whether they were real Soviets or HYDRA he did not know. He knew they’d created the arm somehow and attached it to him - he referred to it as a highly experimental prosthetic, and assured the viewing audience that he did not wish that kind of experimentation on anyone - and he knew that it had all been done under the supervision of Arnim Zola.

“Now, if I’m correct,” Robin said, “This Zola was a scientist in the United States?”

Steve nodded. “He was a Swiss scientist working for HYDRA, and he was brought to the U.S. through Operation Paperclip, which everyone should know about. It was a program where the U.S. government brought Nazi and HYDRA scientists to the States after the war and gave them immunity from war crimes prosecution in exchange for them continuing their scientific work for us.”

“That... sounds like kind of a bad thing, when you put it that way,” Robin said slowly.

Steve nodded grimly. “Personally, I think any program that systematically allows Nazis to go unpunished is a bad thing.”

“Can I ask,” Robin said after a moment’s pause, “how you came to be here, Sergeant?”

“You mean how I got away from HYDRA?” Bucky asked. When Robin nodded, he said,

“They made a mistake. They sent me after Steve. To kill him, I mean. And if there was any one person in the world who would know how to make me remember being me, it would be Steve Rogers. We’ve been best friends since we were four; he knew exactly what to do and say to break through what they did to me. And once I remembered who I was, I - well, let’s just say I resigned my position with extreme prejudice.”

There was a tentative, nervous titter from the crowd, and Bucky gave a grim smile in return.

“This is probably a little awkward, but I’m sure everyone wants to know,” Robin continued, “how exactly it is that you’ve lived this long. We know that Captain Rogers was frozen in Arctic ice, but you weren’t, so...”

“It’s classified,” Bucky said, lying through his teeth.

“There’s speculation that you received the same super-soldier serum that Captain Rogers received,” Robin said.

Bucky shook his head. “Sorry, it’s classified,” he lied again.

Robin’s eyes narrowed and she leaned forward just a little bit. “Sergeant, Captain, were there other soldiers who were administered the super-serum?”

“Almost everything about Project Rebirth is still classified,” Steve said, actually telling the truth. “We really can’t answer that.”

There was a flurry of movement from the offstage guy with the clipboard, and Robin straightened again, wrapping up the segment and thanking Steve and Bucky for appearing. When the red light on the camera went off, Robin stood up. Steve and Bucky stood with her, and they shook her hand. “Thank you for coming on,” she told them.

“Thank you for having us, ma’am,” Bucky replied, giving her his best charming smile even as a couple of interns descended to get their microphone packs and unwire them. “Thanks for letting us get our story out in our own words.”

“Well, I wish you the best of luck with everything,” she said sincerely. “And if you ever want to come back on, we’ll always have space for you. Especially if you want to talk about Project Rebirth,” she added, a bit teasing.

Steve laughed. “Sorry. It really is classified. I’d tell you if I could.”

“That’s all right,” Robin said, grinning. “I’m a reporter. If I couldn’t find out almost everything I want to know on my own, I wouldn’t be very good at my job.” She shook their hands again. “Have a great day, gentlemen,” she said, and just like that, they were dismissed.

“Well,” Bucky said as they made their way out of the building through the back entrance and toward the nearest subway entrance, “that could have gone a lot worse.”

Steve nodded. “I’m pretty pleased.” His phone rang just as they were about to head underground, and they stepped out of the flow of foot traffic so he could answer it. Bucky leaned in to listen.

“You were perfect,” Pepper said the moment he answered. “Both of you. Bucky, that was a stroke of genius, telling them it was classified. That’s going to make it a lot easier to avoid answering questions we don’t want to answer.”

“Thanks,” Bucky said. “Glad we did okay.”

“You were perfect,” Pepper said again. “I could not have asked for it to go any better. You were sympathetic and photogenic and you very carefully avoided talking about the specifics of your captivity, but you did it in a way that people feel like you were talking around things that were done to you rather than things you were made to do.”

“They’ll make the connections soon enough, though,” Bucky said grimly. “When that happens, look out.”

“We’ll deal with it as it comes,” Steve said. “Pepper, can you think of anything else we need to do about this right now?”

“Just lie low for a couple of days,” Pepper said. “If you have to go out, make sure you’re just doing ordinary things - getting the groceries, eating dinner, things like that. No Avenging just yet.”

“Got it,” Steve replied. “Thanks for everything.”

“It’s my pleasure,” Pepper replied, and hung up.

Steve reached out and clapped Bucky on the shoulder. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s go home.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Bucky replied, and they headed underground.

~*~

Sam was the only one of the three of them who was currently gainfully employed; after coming back from the long leave he’d taken to travel with Steve, he’d been very fortunate to be able to transfer from the counseling center in D.C. to one in Brooklyn. Thus it was that Steve and Bucky did not see him until the evening, but when he got home, he hugged both of them enthusiastically. “Saw you on _GMA_ ,” he said. “You were great.”

“Yeah?” Bucky asked. “I was kinda worried I came off like a chump.”

Sam shook his head. “No, you were terrific. Very sympathetic. I mean, obviously everyone won’t feel the same way - people are gonna put two and two together and figure out what HYDRA was using you for. And people are gonna start combing through those files Natasha dropped on Insight Day for any evidence of possible wrongdoing on your part.”

“So we should probably go ahead and get a lawyer now?” Steve asked.

Sam chewed his lip. “Probably wouldn’t hurt,” he admitted. “You should talk to Stark - he can probably recommend someone.”

“He might, or he might not, but I need to talk to him anyway,” Bucky said quietly. “I need to talk to him _first._ He needs to hear it from me.”

“Hear what from you?” Sam asked.

Bucky sighed, looking down at his hands and then back up again at Sam. “I’m the one who killed his parents.”

There was a long silence in the room before Steve said, very softly, “He already knows.”

“He what?” Bucky blurted.

Steve sighed. “Zola told me - the one in the computer. He - it - was bragging about how... How did he put it? Something about changing history. I don’t remember exactly what the words were now. And he didn’t say outright that it was you, but given the givens...” He shrugged. “I talked to Tony about it when Sam and I first started out looking for you.”

“Not hard to figure out,” Sam said, nodding.

“Well.” Bucky took a deep breath and blew it out slowly. “I still need to talk to him about it face to face before we go asking him for any favors for me. He deserves the right to at least take a swing.”

“I don’t know that I’d go that far,” Steve started, but Bucky cut him off with an irritable shake of his head.

“You can’t fix this one, Steve,” he said simply. “This is between me and Stark, and it ain’t your business.”

Steve opened his mouth to argue, but Sam put a hand on his arm. “Bucky’s right,” he said simply. “You gotta stay out of this one, man. I know you wanna jump in and have your boy’s back, but you’ll only make things worse.”

“So, yeah,” Bucky said. “I’m gonna go to Midtown tomorrow and see what Stark says. And then we’ll go from there.”

“Are you sure?” Steve asked softly.

Bucky nodded once, sharply. “I’m sure. It’s gotta be done; the sooner, the better. Get it over with.”

“I’ll come with you,” Steve said. He held up a hand when Bucky started to argue. “I won’t get involved in the conversation. I can always go talk to Pepper or whoever happens to be around. But I’m coming with you.”

Bucky sighed. “And if I go by myself you’ll just follow me, won’t you? Pain in my ass.”

And Steve, the little asshole, _smiled._ “Gosh, Bucky,” he said. “It’s almost like you know me.”


	4. Chapter 4

When Steve and Bucky stepped into the elevator on the ground floor of Stark Tower, they somehow managed to get it all to themselves. As soon as the doors closed, Steve spoke. “Hey, JARVIS.”

“Good morning, Captain Rogers,” JARVIS replied.

“JARVIS, this is my friend Bucky Barnes - the one I was on television with yesterday. You may have heard me talk to Tony about him.”

“Indeed,” JARVIS replied. “Welcome to Stark Tower, Sergeant Barnes. Where would you like to go today?”

“Is anybody on site?” Steve asked. “Other than Tony, I mean.”

“Agent Romanoff has just arrived today, along with Agent Barton. They are in the common area on the ninety-second floor.”

“Excellent, can I go there?”

“Certainly, Captain.”

Bucky interjected. “JARVIS, where’s Stark?”

“Mr. Stark is in his laboratory on eighty-four.”

“Can I see him?”

“Certainly, Sergeant.”  The elevator began to move.

“Thanks, JARVIS,” Bucky said softly.

“You’re quite welcome, Sergeant,” JARVIS replied.

The elevator zipped upward, not quite fast enough to make their ears pop but fast enough all the same. They had to switch elevators at the thirtieth floor and again at the seventieth - that one required a palm-print scan to access - and then they stopped at eighty-four, where the sound of muffled rock music could be heard through the walls.  Bucky took a deep breath when the doors slid open. “Well,” he said to Steve, “wish me luck.”

Steve clapped him on the shoulder. “It’ll be fine,” he said firmly. “And if it’s not, ask JARVIS to tell me and I’ll come running.”

Bucky laughed. “I think I can handle it,” he assured Steve before stepping out. The doors slid shut behind him, and Bucky took another breath before stepping forward. He looked around curiously; the entryway was fairly narrow and glass-walled and it ended at a wide glass door etched with the Stark Industries logo. A small sign under the logo read “No Unauthorized Entry,” but that wasn’t what had Bucky’s eye.

The place was amazing. Through the slightly-foggy glass, Bucky could see banks of computers, things that looked like holograms, several Iron Man suits in various stages of construction (or possibly deconstruction), and even - holy shit, was that a _robot?_

Shaking his head - he’d ask questions later, if Stark was amenable - he walked up to the door and knocked. The music disappeared, and Tony looked up from what he was doing, turning toward the door. He stood and stared at Bucky for a full five seconds before tossing aside the tool he was using. He picked up a rag and wiped his grease-stained hands even as he strolled toward the door. “Barnes, I presume,” he said when the door opened.

“Bucky,” Bucky replied. “And you’re Tony, I guess.”

“Yeah.” they stared at each other for a minute before Tony stepped back. “Come in, I guess. Don’t touch anything.”

Bucky stuck his hands in the pockets of his jeans and followed Tony into the room. The door swung shut behind him. Tony moved back across the workshop and picked up his wrench again. “So, what can I do you for, Barnes?”

“Bucky,” Bucky repeated. “And… well. I guess you saw me and Steve on the tv yesterday.”

“I saw,” Tony replied. He turned to face Bucky, leaning his hip against his worktable.

“Well.” Bucky found himself suddenly unable to proceed. How should he say it? Should he just blurt it out? No, that would not end well. He took a deep breath and spoke carefully. “I guess you’ve looked at the Insight files - Steve said you had JARVIS go through ‘em.”

“I did,” Tony agreed.

Bucky took a deep breath. “So you probably already know what I did.”

“I don’t know,” Tony replied, his voice mild but his face going a little dangerous. “Why don’t you tell me what it is, and then I’ll tell you if I knew about it?”

Bucky nodded. Of course Tony wasn’t going to make this easy for him - and why should he?  “I’ll tell you what I know,” he said after a moment’s pause. “Which isn’t everything, because my access to information was pretty limited back in those days. But this was in the winter of _I think_ 1990\. I’m not sure. I didn’t usually get date-stamped when I came out of cryo; it’s not like the date mattered.” He waved a hand, dismissing his own digression. “Anyway, the point is, HYDRA dragged me out of cryo and they sent me on a mission.”

“And?” Tony prompted.

“My job was pretty simple. There was a car and I was to stop the car and retrieve a briefcase from the driver. No witnesses.” Bucky rubbed at the bridge of his nose. “So I did what they told me to do. I stopped the car, I eliminated the driver and the passenger, and I retrieved the briefcase. I checked the contents; it contained pouches of what I would later learn was the super soldier serum. I took the briefcase back, as ordered.”  He swallowed hard. “I’m sure you already know this, but the driver and passenger were your parents.”

“I know,” Tony agreed. He was silent for a minute. “So why are you here?”

“Because you deserved to hear it from me. And you deserved to know what I know about why, because I’m pretty sure the why wasn’t in the files.”

“No, you’re right, it wasn’t.”  Tony flipped the wrench in his hand, looking at it thoughtfully. “Super soldier serum, huh?”

Bucky nodded.

Tony canted his head just a little. “Did they use it?”

“Yes.”

“Were they successful?”

“Yes.”

“Where are the other soldiers now?”

“Unless they’ve been moved, they’re still at the storage facility in Siberia.” Bucky ran a hand through his hair. “And I doubt they’ve been moved. I… I helped train them. They were… unstable. Unpredictable. And they didn’t follow orders as well as I did. Or at all, really. They started with six, but there’s only five left; one of them died in the process. The others are - as far as I know - still there.”

“That’ll have to be dealt with,” Tony mused. “Sooner rather than later.”

“I’ll help you find them,” Bucky said. “But they can’t be used. They’ll have to be put down.”

Tony looked a little discomfited. “I’m not sure I like the idea of summarily executing innocent people.”

“They’re not innocent,” Bucky replied. “They were HYDRA volunteers. They knew what they were getting into.” He shook his head. “They - look. I know what I did. And there’s no way I can ever make that up to anybody. I killed a lot of people over the years. But I didn’t do it because I wanted to do it. They did.”

“Still,” Tony said, looking perturbed.

“Tony,” Bucky said softly, “you don’t keep a rabid dog around and hope it only bites who you tell it to bite.”

Since that had been the exact direction Tony’s thoughts had been trending in, he grimaced. “You’re serious about this.”

“If I have to do it alone, I will,” Bucky replied, nodding. “They’re too dangerous. I don’t _think_ there’s anyone left who knows where they are, but I could absolutely be wrong. Like I said, I was a little short on intelligence at the time. Both kinds.”

Tony winced. Then he moved to the side, hooking a stool with his foot and sitting down on it. He waved at another one. “Have a seat.”  Bucky grabbed the stool and came to sit a little closer to Tony, waiting for him to speak. “Where is the place?” he asked.

“Siberia,” Bucky replied, and gave Tony the coordinates.

At Tony’s instruction, JARVIS pulled up a satellite map of the area; it appeared to be nothing but an empty, snowy waste. Bucky shook his head. “It’s there,” he said. “It’s just not above ground. You won’t see anything from above.”

“Well,” Tony said. “I guess we need to start planning a raid.” He looked over at Bucky. “I’m not okay with you,” he said. “You killed my parents. But I read the Insight files, and there’s stuff in there on you. On what they did to you to make you what you are. And I know, as much as I hate to admit this, that you’re telling the truth when you say you didn’t want to do it.” He took a deep breath. “So I can be the bigger man this time.”

Bucky knew that was the best he was going to get and, frankly, was surprised to get even that much, so he nodded. “Thanks,” he said simply. Then he turned to the satellite map and started brainstorming the best way to manage the mission.

~*~

Bucky spent about a week after the meeting with Tony thinking about publicity.  He was right about the whole thing: it only took a couple of days after the _GMA_ appearance before people started publicizing what they could dredge out of the Insight files, and what they were finding wasn’t pretty. And naturally, the first thing that hit the news wires was the kill list. There were twenty-seven names on it, and Bucky was pretty sure it was short by five or so.

For a day, all of the news was about how Captain America was harboring an international war criminal.

Then the other stuff started to go public, the torture and brainwashing stuff, and the tide began to turn the other direction. While some channels (like FOX News) continued to run the war criminal story, other more reputable news outlets began to run with the tortured prisoner of war angle. Before long, most of America was treating Bucky like a returning hero.

It made him a little uncomfortable, but Pepper said the best way to handle it was to get out in front of it and lean into his celebrity status for a few weeks, just until the worst of the furor died down.

He dithered for a long time over getting verified on Instagram because that seemed like a good place to start; still, did he want that blue check mark? Did he _want_ people - some of whom thought he ought to go to jail, to know who he was when he was posting his pictures?

On the other hand, did he want people - many of whom had strongly supported him and sometimes made impassioned defenses of him on blogs and Twitter posts and things - to know _who he was_ when he was posting his pictures?

Eventually he decided tentatively in favor of the blue check and went through the verification process. Within about an hour, he had a blue check mark. He nodded at his phone, then dialed Steve’s number.

“Hey, Bucky,” Steve greeted him. “What’s up?”

“Are you busy?” Bucky asked.

Steve said, “Not really. Watching Tony do something with my body armor. I’m pretty sure it’s witchcraft.”

“Probably,” Bucky agreed. “Will you tweet that I have an Instagram? I changed the name; it’s bucky-underscore-barnes.”

There was a moment’s pause as Steve processed both the information and the request, but then he said, “Of course.” then he asked, “You think that’s the right place to start?”

“Yeah,” Bucky said. “It seems… well. More personal? It lets people see who I am, I guess, and so they feel like they’ll get more of a connection with me. That’s what Pepper’s PR lady said, anyway.”

“Sounds sensible. Hey, why don’t you come into Manhattan?” Steve invited. “Tony and I were thinking about Italian for lunch.”

_“He’s not invited!”_ Tony’s voice announced from the background, and Bucky laughed again.

“Be there in an hour,” he promised, and hung up.

Steve made his tweet, and by the time Bucky reached Manhattan, he had ten thousand followers. By the time they dug into dessert, he had almost a hundred thousand. “I have over thirty-nine million,” Tony bragged over tiramisu.

“Steve has forty-one,” Bucky replied easily.

Before Tony could lose his mind, Steve interjected, his voice tired. “I don’t have an Instagram.” He rolled his eyes at Bucky. “You can’t _always_ win by pointing out that I have a larger _whatever_ than Tony has.”

There was a long pause while Tony and Bucky eyeballed one another. In a low, dangerous voice, Bucky said, “Bet I can.”

Tony slowly put his fork down and his hands began to move toward the edge of the table.

Steve realized what he’d said and yelped. “ _No!_ ”

Bucky sighed dramatically. “No fun,” he grumbled.

“I will give you a piece of advice about Instagram,” Tony said, pointing a finger at Bucky. “The same as any other area of the Internet. And especially for you, since you’re... shall we say, polarizing?” When Bucky nodded, Tony continued, weirdly sincere. “Most people would say don’t read the comments at all, but that’s almost the whole point of Instagram. So instead, let JARVIS moderate your comments.”

Bucky blinked. “Sorry, what?”

For the first time, JARVIS spoke up. “I am in the habit of screening the comments left on Mr. Stark’s social media accounts. Positive and constructive feedback is accepted and posted as normal; non-constructive comments, such as hate and/or vitriol, are removed almost instantaneously. I would be more than happy to provide the same service to you.”

“People will comment on every picture you post, thousands and thousands of comments,” Tony explained. “They will be more supportive than hateful, but the hateful ones are the ones you’ll remember. Let JARVIS moderate your comments.”

“That... actually sounds like a great idea,” Bucky said, nodding. “Thanks, JARVIS. And you, too, Tony.”

“Don’t mention it,” Tony replied. “Seriously, don’t mention it. I don’t want people to get the idea that I give a shit.”

“Right, of course,” Steve said dryly. “That would be horrible.”

“You’re damn right it would,” Tony agreed.


	5. Chapter 5

In the midst of a punishing summer heat wave about a month after going public, Bucky posted a photo to his Instagram. The subject was simple: the living room ceiling. _I want to go outside,_ the caption read, _but I can’t move. It’s too hot to exist._

Bucky let his arm flop back down onto the floor and heaved a sigh, staring up at the ceiling. “It’s too hot,” he complained.

“Tell me about it,” replied Steve, who was lying about three feet away.

“It never got this hot when we were kids,” Bucky groaned.

Steve laughed softly. “Yes, it did,” he said. “We’ve just gotten out of the habit of being hot. Seventy years on ice will do that to you.”

“We are weak,” Bucky agreed solemnly. “And I am not ashamed.”

“Neither am I,” Steve replied. “Maybe we should move further north to get away from the heat.”

“I’ve heard the North Pole is nice this time of year,” Bucky agreed.

“The more the two of you talk, the more hot air there is circulating in this room,” Sam said from the doorway. “Also, you both look pathetic.”

“Hey, that’s not nice,” Bucky said. “I have trauma.”

“You don’t have heat-related trauma,” Sam replied.

“I might,” Bucky disagreed. “You don’t know what I talk to my therapist about.”

“And for that I thank the good Lord every day,” Sam said. “Would you like me to turn the air conditioner down a little?”

“But the electricity bill,” Steve whined.

“Pick a problem,” Sam replied mercilessly.

Bucky made an executive decision. “Please turn the air conditioner down.”

Chuckling, Sam moved back into the hall and adjusted the thermostat. “I’m thinking we could just have chef salads for dinner,” he said, coming back into the living room. “Since it’s so hot and all. We don’t want to eat anything heavy.”

“That sounds good,” Steve said. “We could get them delivered from that diner around the corner.”

“Or we could just _go_ to the diner,” Sam offered.

“Leave the house?” Bucky asked, horror in his voice. “In this heat?”

“It’ll be good for you,” Sam said, crossing the living room and going into the kitchen. He grabbed a bottle of water out of the fridge and came back into the living room. “It’ll build character.”

“I submit that I have had all the character-building experiences I need in one lifetime,” Bucky said flatly.

“You know,” Steve said thoughtfully, “you can’t play the trauma card _every_ time.”

“I can, too,” Bucky replied. “Because I have trauma.”

Sam pointed a finger at Steve. “He’s got you there.”

With a soft groan, Steve peeled himself off the floor and stood. “I’m going upstairs to take a cool shower,” he said. “When I get done, we can go around to the diner and get salads.”

“And pie.” Bucky lifted his hand to look at his phone, where his photo of the ceiling already had several thousand likes and quite a bit of commiseration about the heat. “If I’m getting off this floor, there’d better be pie.”

“They have that good lemon meringue,” Sam offered.

“Oh yeah,” Bucky said. “Okay. I’m convinced.”

“Good.” Sam cocked his head, staring down at Bucky. “You should take a shower, too. You smell like a community center gym.”

“Rude,” Bucky replied. “You shouldn’t be mean to me. I have trauma.”

“You don’t go take a shower, I’m gonna give you more trauma,” Sam replied, waving a fist in a not-vaguely-threatening manner.

Pretending to cower, Bucky pushed himself to his feet. “Oh, _fine_ ,” he grumbled. “Be that way.”

~*~

That day, for the first time ever, they were stopped on the street by someone who _didn’t_ want a picture with Steve. “Excuse me,” the voice said, its owner approaching them from the side, “but aren’t you Bucky Barnes?”

Bucky braced himself, turning to face the young man in fatigues who was standing there holding his cover in his hands. “Yeah,” he said. “Who’s asking?”

“Oh, sorry, Sergeant” the young man replied. “SPC Brian Sheaffer. US Army.” And he saluted.

Out of pure habit, Bucky straightened up and saluted back. “What can I do for you, Sheaffer?”

“Sergeant, I just... I wanted to tell you that I read about what happened to you and I think it’s bullshit and I’m glad you made it home safe.”

“Thank you, Sheaffer,” Bucky said softly.

Sheaffer twisted his cover briefly in his hands before saying, a bit meekly, “I was wondering, also... could I take a picture with you?”

Sam and Steve both grinned wide; Bucky just smiled slightly. “Sure. Got your phone? Steve’ll take the picture for us.”

Steve gladly took the picture, Bucky and the young soldier standing shoulder to shoulder, both smiling for the camera. Then he handed the phone back to the young man. “You should post that on Instagram and tag Bucky in it.”

“Oh, I will!” Sheaffer replied. “Definitely! Thanks, Captain.” And he saluted Steve smartly as well.

Steve saluted back, and Bucky said, “Good to meet you, Sheaffer. Keep your head down and your eyes open, yeah?”

“Always, Sarge,” Sheaffer replied, grinning. “Have a great day.” With that, he turned and trotted off.

“Well, wasn’t that something?” Sam said, grinning, as they headed toward the diner again.

“Zip it, Wilson,” Bucky grumbled, but he was still smiling.

~*~

The heat wave finally broke with a massive thunderstorm that lasted a full three days. Sam and Steve both had to go out in it - Steve had begun volunteering to teach art classes at a community center in Flatbush and Sam had to go to work - but Bucky didn’t have anywhere in particular to go, so he amused himself for the first day by taking weird detail shots of the house and posting some of them on Instagram. _Here’s the crown molding in our entryway,_ he captioned one such photo. _It’s supposed to be original, but I have my doubts._ Another read _If you ever wanted to see what Captain America has on his shower curtain, I present to you the green and white stripes of_ ☆☆ _freedom_ ☆☆ _._

His followers loved the little glimpses into his home, if their reactions were anything to go by (they especially loved the shot of the Ever-Growing Shoe Pile by the front door, with thousands of them proclaiming that it was a “mood”), but he got bored with it after about the fifth picture, so he finished out the run with a picture of his bed, made up neatly, with a bright pink Build-A-Bear in a sparkly skirt propped up against the pillows ( _Her name is Katharine, as in Hepburn,_ he told his audience. _Sam Wilson gave her to me. I’m taken with the skirt; I may get one for myself._ )

So he got bored. But there was nothing to do; he sure wasn’t going to take a walk anywhere in this weather, but he didn’t feel like watching car crash videos on YouTube or nature documentaries on the TV, and he needed something to do.

He wandered around the house aimlessly for an hour or so, restlessly tidying things. He even put away all the shoes out of the Ever-Growing Shoe Pile. Finally, he wandered into the kitchen, thinking about putting together a boredom sandwich. Once there, though, his eye fell on the recipe book Sam’s mother had made for him.

“Huh,” he said.

Then he leaned on the counter and flipped the book open, slowly leafing through the pages, just out of curiosity. He stopped on one page that caught his eye and hummed softly. He looked up at the clock. He looked back down at the page. He stood up and walked over to the refrigerator, checking inside. Then he said “What the hell, how hard can it be?” and went to work.

~*~

“I made a pan of cornbread,” Bucky said when Sam stepped through the front door that night. “Because I know you like it so much.”

“Well, that was really nice of you, Bucky,” Sam replied, kicking his shoes off by the door to start a new shoe pile and then hanging his bag on the coat tree. “Did you use that mix from the freezer?”

“No, I made it from scratch from your mom’s recipe book.” Bucky beamed. “And I made red beans and rice, too.” He paused, then shrugged a little bit, his grin turning down just a little. “That _did_ come from a box, because all the recipes I found online said the beans had to be soaked overnight first.”

“That’s okay,” Sam assured him. “Was it a Zatarain’s mix?”

Bucky nodded. “Yeah, I found it in the back of the cupboard.”

“Mix or not, Zatarain’s makes good red beans,” Sam told him. “Honestly, my mama makes red beans from scratch in the pressure cooker but I am straight up afraid of using that thing and getting blown to kingdom come.” He clapped Bucky’s shoulder. “Want to get it all served up? Steve’s right behind me; he just stopped to get the mail.”

“Sure.” Bucky nodded again and led the way into the kitchen.

Sam complimented everything; the red beans and rice mix was full of flavorful sliced sausage and the cornbread smelled delicious and Bucky had even made a jug of sweet tea to go along with the meal. They were putting dishes on the table when Steve came in. He kicked his shoes off by Sam’s and put the mail on the kitchen counter, coming around to drop a kiss on Sam’s cheek and hug Bucky around the shoulders. “What’s all this?”

Bucky identified the food items and Steve nodded. “Well it smells delicious,” he said. “I can’t wait.”

They seated themselves at the table and dug into their food. While Bucky told them about his day and showed Sam his Instagram pictures, Steve split one of his cornbread pieces in half and spread it with butter, then took a big bite - and an odd expression crossed his face, just for a moment, before he chewed once and swallowed hard.

Bucky did not see that expression; he’d been looking at Sam. Sam saw it, though. Curious, he broke off a piece of his own cornbread and popped it into his mouth.

It wasn’t _bad_ , per se, it was just that something about it tasted... _not quite right._ Being something of a glutton for punishment (to wit: two WWII-era roommates in various stages of defrosting) he tried another, larger piece.

This time the flavor came to him, strong enough that he almost spit the cornbread out onto his plate. It was soap. It definitely tasted like soap. And metal. What the fuck had Barnes put in that cornbread?! Sam met Steve’s eyes across the table and managed to swallow the bite in his mouth, applying himself to the red beans instead to try and get the metallic, soapy taste out of his mouth, all the while hoping he wasn’t about to die from some kind of food poisoning.

“How is it?” Bucky asked after a minute. “Is it good?”

And Steve, bless him, attempted to deflect. “You should try it, Buck,” he said, trying hard to hide the agony on his face.

Not hard enough. Bucky’s eyes narrowed. “If it’s not good, say so,” he said flatly.

“It’s...” Steve’s voice trailed off, the weak bastard.

Sam sighed. “It’s got a funny flavor to it,” he admitted. “What all did you put in it?”

Bucky began reciting the ingredients. “Flour, cornmeal, sugar and salt, baking soda, butter, milk, and an egg.”

“That sounds right,” Sam said, frowning as he tried to visualize his grandmother’s kitchen at Thanksgiving. Then he paused, his mind’s eye catching on a small white can emblazoned with a red logo. “Wait. Did you say baking _soda_? From the orange box?”

“Yeah, baking soda,” Bucky replied.

Sam reached out and squeezed Bucky’s hand gently. “You’re supposed to use baking _powder_ in cornbread,” he said. “That’s why it tastes funny.”

“Aw, jeez,” Bucky said. “I ruined it.”

“It’s not ruined,” Steve protested stoutly. “It’s still edible.”

“Steve, it’s not -” Bucky began, but Steve, to prove himself, crammed a huge bite into his mouth. He couldn’t get it down without looking like he regretted every decision he’d made in his life, though, and Bucky laughed hard enough at Steve’s face that he was able to move past the embarrassment of having messed up the recipe.

Once they’d settled down a bit, Sam clapped Bucky on the shoulder. “We’ll make cornbread again this weekend,” he said. “And slow cook some ribs to go along with it.”

“Ooh. With your grandpa’s sauce?” Bucky asked hopefully.

Grinning, Sam nodded, and Bucky pumped a fist. “Worth it!”


	6. Chapter 6

“Okay,” Tony said to the assembled Avengers Sam, and Bucky, “we have a problem.”

“What’s wrong?” Steve asked.

Tony tapped at the smart glass on the tabletop, and a holographic screen opened up beside his head displaying a man’s photograph. Bucky felt his jaw drop, but there was no time to gawk; Tony was continuing. “This is Helmut Zemo,” he said. “He used to be a colonel in the Sokovian Army, and he has a bone to pick with me.”

“Okay, why?” Clint asked.

“Sokovia has been what you’d call war-torn for years; geographically speaking, it’s strategically important, so there are constant attempts from various powers to take control. Stark weapons have been used in several attacks on the country, and one particular such attack on the capital city of Novigrad resulted in Zemo losing his family.”

“Ah,” Thor said. “So he blames you for the use of the weapons you designed.”

“Exactly,” Tony replied. “And as far as I can tell, these were some of the black market weapons my dad’s business partner Obadiah Stane sold behind my back. Well. When I wasn’t looking.” He grimaced. “Anyway, Zemo.”

“How do we know this?” Steve asked.

Tony shrugged. “I keep my ears to the ground. And it’s a good thing I do, because I’m not actually Zemo’s target; Barnes is.”

Bucky blinked. “Me? What’d I ever do to him?”

“Not anything, as far as I can tell,” Tony replied. “But he knows what you were, and I guess he thinks he can use you.”

Bucky was silent for a long moment before he said softly, “He’s got the book.”

“What book?” Sam asked.

Bucky swallowed hard, then cleared his throat. “There’s a book. The Russians had it, but they didn’t turn it over to American HYDRA. It’s got lists. Trigger words. There’s a sequence that… that basically turns off my brain and makes me do what they tell me to do.” He ran a hand through his hair. “American HYDRA didn’t have them, so they used the chair to basically erase me and write those orders on a blank slate, but the Russians were… different.”

Steve reached out and squeezed Bucky’s shoulder. Bucky gave him a quirk of a sad smile, then turned his attention back to Tony.

“All right,” Tony said. “Then we need to find Zemo and get this book away from him.”

“How do we do that?” Sam asked.

“I am currently searching all available CCTV data in the city in an effort to find him,” JARVIS interjected, “based on a logical supposition that, if Colonel Zemo is seeking Sergeant Barnes, he will come to New York.”

“Makes sense,” Natasha murmured. “And when you find him, what then?”

“That depends on Zemo,” Tony replied. “It’s possible he can be reasoned with; it’s also possible he’s not thinking past his pound of flesh. I figure we can deal with it as it comes.”

“If he’s looking to control me, he’s probably not going to be very reasonable,” Bucky pointed out. “I can’t really be reasoned with once somebody runs those trigger words.”

“We’re aware,” Tony said wryly. “So that’s why I was going to suggest that you should probably take cover in the tower until we can find this guy; it’s more secure than your place in Brooklyn.”

Bucky looked from Steve to Sam and back to Steve. Sam just shrugged; Steve looked thoughtful before saying, “It’s really your call, Buck. I can see where Tony’s coming from, though.”

Bucky nodded. “Yeah, okay,” he said. “But then again…” He paused, thinking, and then continued, “we could also use me. As bait, I mean.”

“No,” Steve said flatly, even as Natasha and Clint made thoughtful noises. “No, absolutely not,” Steve repeated.

“Hear me out,” Bucky said, holding up one finger at Steve. “I’m not suggesting I just wander around town unsupervised until he comes at me. I’m suggesting that once we know he’s in the city, I can make some controlled exercises. Like, I dunno, the park or the greenmarket or something. Places where he might approach me and try to say the words. But somebody could be shadowing me and, you know, knock him over the head before he gets them all out. There’s like ten words and they have to be said in the proper rhythm; he won’t get them out before either I or someone else has a chance to pop him one.”

“Only if I can back you up,” Steve said.

Sam snorted. “Are you kidding? With you playing bodyguard, Zemo will _never_ approach. It needs to be somebody else.”

“Somebody less well known as an Avenger,” Natasha added.

“Yes,” Thor offered thoughtfully. “Someone who blends into a crowd better than others, but who is still sharp-eyed and sharp-witted.”

Slowly, every head in the room turned in one direction. Clint blinked. “What’s everyone staring at me for?”

~*~

Bucky was disgusted to discover that all of the plants in the lavish apartment Tony was housing him in were fake. “Seriously?” he said to Sam after poking at the pot of the last one. “Not a single real plant in the whole place?”

“It’s a crying shame,” Sam said from the depths of the sofa, remote in one hand and bowl of popcorn in the other. “I think this TV is twice the size of the one we have at home.”

“At least,” Steve said absently from the kitchen. “There’s no Top Ramen in here. What am I supposed to eat?”

“Real food, for once?” Sam suggested.

There was a long pause before Steve and Bucky both said, in unison, “Nah.” Steve went back to poking around in the cupboards and Bucky sighed. “I’m going to go stand in that shower with the million jets and see what it’s like,” he said.

“I bet it’s terrifying,” Steve offered, unearthing a box of Ritz crackers and a jar of peanut butter. “Like being caught in a water tornado.”

“That’s what I’m hoping,” Bucky replied. “I haven’t had any good heart-pounding, terror-inducing experiences lately.”

“You need at least one a month to clear the cobwebs out,” Steve agreed, mouth full of cracker and peanut butter.

Bucky headed down the hallway to the bedroom he’d claimed for himself. A duffel bag rested on the bed, product of Steve’s trip home, and he dug into it for clean underwear and a pair of sweats. He stripped off, folding his dirty clothes and stacking them on a chair, and then padded into the bathroom. After locating towels and toiletries, he stepped into the huge shower stall and closed the door, looking around.

The shower was really a certain variety of ridiculous. It had two overhead sprinklers and several body-jets, and a bench in the back for use, Bucky assumed, with the sauna feature. Bucky shook his head. “Nobody needs all this,” he said, determinedly turning on every sprinkler and jet he could find.

It was like an explosion; he was being pummeled from all sides with warm water, hitting him in all the right places to soothe some of the stress-tension in his tight muscles. He shifted just a little bit to let one of the jets work at the juncture between his left shoulder and arm; the force there was almost as good as a shoulder rub from Steve’s strong hands, and he groaned a little bit. “Oh yeah,” he said aloud. “That’s the ticket right there.”

After a few minutes, he started washing up, attending to his hair and body with businesslike efficiency. Once he was done, he stood in the spray for a few more minutes before shutting off the jets and turning on the sauna feature.

Water continued to fall from the overhead sprinklers, though now at the pace of gentle rainfall, and steam started billowing in from vents at floor-level. Bucky took a seat on the bench and leaned back against the tile, yelping a little bit at the cold before the ceramic warmed to his body temperature. He rested his head against the wall and closed his eyes.

He wasn’t sure how long he sat there melting in the heavy warmth, but after awhile, there was a knock on the bathroom door and Steve stuck his head in. “All right in there?” he asked.

“Capitalist decadence,” Bucky replied. “Eat the rich.”

“So you’re enjoying yourself, then.”

“There’s a sauna feature,” Bucky advised him. “It’s very warm.”

Steve chuckled. “Just don’t spend all your energy; Sam wants us to watch a few episodes of _The X-Files_.”

Bucky sighed dramatically, then stood to shut the sauna off. “Fine then,” he said. “I’ll be out in a few.”

He had, in fact, expended more energy than he expected just sitting in that wet heat; he wasn’t totally enervated, but he did feel a little noodly when he folded himself into one of the armchairs facing the television in the living room. “Okay,” he said to Sam. “Show me this cinematic masterpiece.”

“If you don’t love this show, there is something wrong with you,” Sam replied, putting the first episode on.

Bucky actually liked the first two episodes but didn’t make it through the third, falling asleep around the time that the suspected villain was being given a polygraph examination. He woke to Steve shaking his shoulder. “Hey, pal,” Steve said gently, “why don’t you go on to bed?”

“Yeah,” Bucky said, his words a little mushy. “Yeah, I’m gonna… I’m gonna go to bed.”

Steve gave him a hand up out of the cushy chair and Bucky wandered off down the hall, pausing only to put his duffel on the floor before crawling into bed. He was out within minutes.

~*~

The morning after their conference, Thor was called back to Asgard to deal with some kind of interplanetary emergency. This was unfortunate; the Avengers had been looking forward to having his bulk and tactical mind on their side when the time came for action. Still, they understood that he had to be responsible for more than just Midgard, and they told him to get in touch if there turned out to be anything they could help with.

It was three more days before JARVIS found Zemo; he was unsubtly lurking around the little neighborhood in Red Hook where Bucky, Sam, and Steve lived, clearly trying to find them. He obviously didn’t know where their house was; even though they’d been photographed in front of it more than once, it was just an ordinary brownstone like thousands of others. Still, Zemo had found their little area; Tony posited that he’d managed it from a study of paparazzi photographs of both Steve and Bucky, many of which showed enough of their subjects’ surroundings that it would be possible to triangulate a general area that the two of them frequented.

Within that little area was a small greenmarket where the three of them often shopped; Sam maintained that they needed to eat vegetables along with their meals, so they visited the market frequently for fresh veggies and fruits. It had good sight lines from at least three directions, so Clint figured out the best sniper’s nest and armed himself with what he liked to call a club arrow – it had an end that was large and round and padded like a beanbag, and could be shot with enough force to knock out the target without splitting his head open.

So Clint was deployed to the roof of the building he’d chosen, and Bucky went alone into the greenmarket. He followed his usual routine, greeting all the sellers he knew, never letting on that there was an earpiece in his ear that would let Clint – and everyone else – know exactly what he could hear. He picked up and put down several items as he wandered through the market, making a show of being undecided about what he wanted, and he was just beginning to wonder whether this was a waste of time when a voice behind him said, very softly, “желание.”

Bucky stiffened, but the voice continued. “ржавый.” Then, “печь.” And then “расс- _unf_.” The word was interrupted, and the _unf_ was followed almost immediately by a _thud._ Several people gasped and a circle quickly cleared out around the fallen man.

Bucky put down the carrots he was holding and turned, leaning down to examine the unconscious body. “I got this,” he said, rolling the man over on top of the telltale arrow that was lying on the ground. It was definitely Zemo. He gathered up the unresisting form, carefully getting the arrow as well, and carried him out of the market, laying him on a bench nearby and taking his hand, checking his pulse. Then he checked the guy’s eyes (pupil response indicated a concussion).

Zemo wasn’t unconscious for long; Clint hadn’t actually hit him all that hard, letting the weight of the beanbag do most of the work, and so it was only about fifteen seconds or so before Zemo groaned, clearly coming around. “There you go,” Bucky said to him, loud enough for onlookers to hear. “Come on, man, wake up.”

He raised his head, looking over at the nearest merchant. “He’s all right, Susan; he’s waking up. I’ve got a friend nearby; I’ll call him and get him to come take him to the hospital.”

Susan, a former Marine who had spent a few hours trading war stories with Bucky one afternoon when it wasn’t busy, nodded. “Sounds good,” she said. “You’ll take care of him?”

“You bet I will,” Bucky replied. He pulled out his phone and pretended to make the call; five minutes later, one of Stark’s cars pulled up right at the curb. Bucky pulled the still-dazed Zemo to his feet and gently escorted him into the car, then climbed in behind him. He shut the door, and the car pulled away, heading for Manhattan and Stark Tower.


	7. Chapter 7

“Huh,” said Tony when Bucky and Steve maneuvered the now-awake-and-resisting Zemo into a secure conference room on eighty-nine. “He looks smaller in person.”

“So do you,” Bucky replied shortly. He waited for Steve to pull out a chair, then none too gently pushed Zemo into it. “Right,” he said to Zemo. “Start talking.”

“I have nothing to say to you,” Zemo replied. “Murderers! You’re all murderers!”

“Some of us more than others,” Bucky agreed. “But then, you’re the one who’s been looking for me, so maybe your hands ain’t so clean, either.”

“I have killed no one who did not deserve it!” Zemo exclaimed. “Unlike you, tool of HYDRA!”

“Is that what this is?” Bucky asked. “Some kind of revenge tour against HYDRA? ‘Cause I already did one, pal, and I promise you mine was a lot more effective than yours could ever be.”

“Pah!” Zemo made a spitting noise. “I care nothing for HYDRA.”

“What, then?” Steve asks. “What’s your purpose? What’s the point?”

Zemo turned slowly to look at Steve. “Do you know, Captain, how much research I have done into your little team? I thought about nothing else for over a year. I studied you. I followed you. But now that you're standing here, I just realized… there's a bit of green in the blue of your eyes. How nice to find a flaw.”

“This is getting us nowhere,” Tony said. “Where’s the book, Zemo? The one with the codes in it.”

Zemo looked over at Tony then and smiled. It was not a pleasant smile. “I burned it,” he said. “Now nobody knows how to control the Winter Soldier except for me. Are you disappointed, Iron Man? You always seem to want the best weapons at your disposal, and he is definitely one of the best. But then… perhaps you already know, hmm? Do you know just how good a weapon the Soldier is?”

“Sure I do,” Tony replied, waving a hand as though dismissing the issue. “We all do.”

Zemo leaned forward a little bit, his teeth baring in a manic grin. “Do you really, Iron Man? Or do you only think you do?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Tony asked, his eyes narrowing.

Zemo sat back in his chair, still grinning that crazed grin. “You’d like to know, wouldn’t you? I could show you, though. Perhaps. If I were convinced.”

“Hmm,” Tony said. “And what would it take to convince you?”

“Oh, no, Iron Man,” Zemo chuckled. “It won’t be so easy, no no no.”

Tony rolled his eyes. “We’re done here,” he said. “Come on, Steve, Bucky.” He moved toward the door. It slid open, letting Steve and Bucky out, and Tony was about to follow them when Zemo spoke again. “December 16, 1991.”

Tony turned to stare at Zemo. “What?”

“You heard me,” Zemo replied. “But please, go, talk of me with your super-powered friends. Decide what it is that you must do with me. I am eager to be dealt with in whatever way you and your super-powered friends choose.”

After a moment, Tony left the room. “JARVIS,” he said, “lock that door. Nobody goes in or out except on my say-so.”

“Done, sir,” JARVIS replied.

The three of them walked away from the room so that Zemo couldn’t watch them through the glass wall; in another, smaller room, they sat down and looked at one another. “I know what he’s referring to,” Tony said after a moment.

“That date?” Steve asked. When Tony nodded, Steve said, “What happened on that date?”

“I know what happened,” Bucky said softly. “I was wrong about it being 1990, wasn’t I, Tony?”

Tony nodded. “Yeah,” he said simply. He ran a hand through his hair, then stood up, starting to pace. “Okay, this is bigger than us, though. This is bigger than him just wanting to cause trouble or drive a wedge. My contacts told me the guy he got the book from - a guy called Karpov - was tortured and then drowned. You don’t do that kind of thing to get that kind of information for something as small as fucking with the head of one or two people.”

Bucky went still. “He knows about the others.”

“The other soldiers, you mean?” Steve asked.

Bucky nodded. “That has to be it. I don’t know if Karpov told him or if he found out some other way, but he did. He knows about the others and he’s trying to get them, maybe to use them. He doesn’t know that they’re all - he can’t possibly know; not even a crazy man would try to use them if he knew what they were like.”

“Unless there’s passwords for them, too,” Tony said thoughtfully.

“That could be it,” Steve agreed. “He might know passwords for them that would force them to obey. Bucky, did they have them?”

“I don’t know.” Bucky shook his head. “I don’t think so; if they did, HYDRA would have used them when Josef rebelled. But… maybe?”

“How do we find out?” Steve asked.

“No idea,” Tony replied, flopping down into his chair again. “If he really did burn that book, there’d be no way of ever finding out. If he didn’t, we’ll never be able to figure out where he’s hidden it. It’s probably not even in the States.”

“Karpov would have known, but Karpov is dead. But…” Bucky pursed his lips for a moment, thinking. “Lukin might know, if he’s still alive.”

“Lukin?” Steve asked.

Bucky nodded. “Aleksandr Lukin. Karpov’s second.”

“Any idea where we might find him?”

“Not the faintest,” Bucky replied, shaking his head. “Like I said, I don’t even know if he’s still alive.”

“Let me and JARVIS do the research on that,” Tony replied. “If he’s still alive, we’ll find him.”

“All right,” Bucky said. “In the meantime, what are we going to do with Zemo?”

~*~

It took, in the end, a couple of days to organize Zemo’s dispensation; it was hard trying to find someone who would take him seriously as a threat. Eventually, Steve ended up calling in a favor, and that call-in resulted in Sharon Carter showing up at the tower around noon on the third day. Steve met her in the Avengers common area.

“I can’t take him,” she began without any preamble. “The CIA is legally prohibited from operating on US soil. But you tell me he’s dangerous and I believe you. So I’ve called in my own favor from a friend at the NSA, and they’re going to take him.”

“Thank you,” Steve said, real gratitude in his voice. “I genuinely didn’t know what to do with him, and he can’t be let go; we’re pretty sure he – well. You need to keep this one under your hat. But Bucky says there are other Winter Soldiers, and we think Zemo was trying to get hold of one or all of them.”

Sharon’s eyes went wide and her face froze in shock. “There are more of them?”

Steve nodded. “Bucky says there’s five of them. Somewhere in Siberia, but I don’t know where.”

“Steve, you need to find out,” she said urgently. “That’s information we need to have.”

Steve paused. “We as in who? The government? The government that would probably try to wake them and use them?”

Sharon opened her mouth to speak, then paused. “Okay, fair,” she said. “But _somebody_ needs to know. Somebody needs to deal with them.”

Steve nodded. “I know that,” he said. “The question is, who and how?”

“That’s two questions,” Tony said, breezing in with Bucky just behind him. “And I have to say, I don’t care if it was Secretly HYDRA In Every Last Department, this is a time when having SHIELD around would be _really_ useful.”

“You’re not wrong,” Steve admitted with a wry twist to his mouth. “We might need to start cultivating relationships with some of the alphabet agencies so that when this happens in the future we don’t have this problem.”

“When?” Sharon repeated.

“You don’t think this is the last time somebody’s gonna come looking for the Winter Soldier, do you?” Bucky asked. He walked over and held out a hand to shake. “Bucky Barnes, ma’am, pleased to meet you.”

She stood and shook his hand briskly. “Sharon Carter, CIA.”

“Carter?” Bucky asked. “Any relation?”

“My aunt,” Sharon admitted.

Steve blinked. “You never told me that.”

“You never asked,” Sharon pointed out. “Anyway, that’s beside the point. Bucky, I think you’re right about people coming after you.

“I know I’m right,” Bucky replied. “The question is what to do about it. But before we can address that question, I think it’s more important for us to focus on Zemo.”

“Speaking of Zemo, where is he?” Sharon asked.

Tony waved a hand and a hologram popped up, showing a video image of Zemo cooling his heels in a well-appointed, if small, guest room. “I locked him up in one of the guest suites,” he said. “We’ve been feeding and watering him regularly and letting him watch TV, but he’s got no Internet access or any kind of outside communication and JARVIS has the door locked.”

Sharon nodded. “Well, that’s more than he’ll get at the Raft, I guarantee you,” she said grimly. She pulled out her phone. “Let me tell them he’s ready for pickup.”

“Raft?” Bucky asked.

Sharon grimaced. “Top secret,” she told him, “but it’s essentially the prison where he’ll be spending the rest of his life.”

“Extraordinary rendition,” Tony said, a little sour. “Just one more thing the CIA is good at.” He shook his head. “All right. I’m going to go in one more time,” he said. “Just to see if he comes out with any new information to try and leverage not going to your new favorite black site.”

“I’ll come with you,” Bucky said. “Steve, Sharon, you two watch from here. See if you notice anything we don’t.”

~*~

Zemo looked cool as a cucumber when Tony entered his room. “Iron Man,” he said. “Come to bargain?”

“Sure, if you want to call it that,” Tony replied. “I’ve got some friends from the CIA and the NSA here who’d like to take you elsewhere for a little chat. I figured I’d give you a chance to tell me anything you think I need to know before we say goodbye.”

Zemo’s eyes cut to Bucky, who was blocking the doorway like a nightclub bouncer, and back to Tony. “How does it feel,” he offered, clearly desperate, “working with the murderer of your parents?”

There was a long silence in the room before Tony nodded. “So that’s your play,” he said. “You thought I didn’t know, and you want to – what? Break up the Avengers? Is that why you keep focusing on Iron Man?”

“You war-mongering piece of shit!” Zemo spat. “Everywhere you go, you bring death and destruction in your wake! I will see the end of you! And your band of superpowered warmongers, too!”

“Well,” Bucky said softly, “you gave it a good try, at least.” He shrugged. “It’s just too bad for you that Tony already knew about me; see, Zemo, the difference between me and you is that I know when I’ve done wrong, and I try to atone for it. How many people did _you_ kill, trying to get your hands on that book from Karpov, hmm?”

“Well, if that’s all you’ve got, I guess we’ll go,” Tony said.

Bucky stepped forward into the room, letting Tony move around him and out into the hallway; Zemo, losing the plot entirely, lunged toward them in a last-ditch effort to get to Tony. He never made it; Bucky delivered a half-strength punch to Zemo’s midsection that left him on the floor, panting and groaning. Then he stepped back into the hallway.

“JARVIS,” Tony said, and the door closed, a single beep letting them know it had been locked.

“Thanks, JARVIS,” Bucky said, and he turned with Tony to head back upstairs to the common room.

~*~

“You know,” Bucky said that night around a mouthful of popcorn, “Mulder and Scully really belong together. They should get married.” The moment he said that, Sam started giggling.

“Are you kidding?” Steve replied, incredulous. “That would ruin their working relationship. They’re _much_ better off as partners and friends. Besides, she’s too good for him. Way too classy. He’s a schmuck.”

“I’ll fight you, Rogers,” Bucky said. “Don’t think I won’t.”

By this point in the conversation, Sam was nearly in hysterics. He’d spilled popcorn all over his lap – Steve had to rescue the bowl – and had laid completely over on his side, clutching his stomach. Steve waited for him to take a breath before asking what was so funny, and Sam, still chortling, began to explain about fandom and shipping and ship wars. “Back in the day when it was airing on TV,” he said, “and I don’t know about this personally but I have an older cousin who does, but anyway, the big argument in the fandom was whether or not they should be together. And people who said they did were called shippers, and people who said they didn’t were called noromos.”

“Noromos?” Bucky repeated. “That’s not even a word.”

“It means no-romance,” Sam explained. “The opposite of a shipper.”

Steve nodded. “So Bucky’s a shipper and I’m a … noromo?”

“Exactly,” Sam said. He chuckled some more. “This is great; I can’t wait to tell my cousin that Captain America’s a noromo.”

“So this fanfiction business,” Bucky said. “People write stories about TV shows?”

“Yeah, and movies and video games and… pretty much any kind of media. Some people write about real people, too.”

“Real…” Steve’s voice trailed off for a second as he put the pieces together. “Oh sweet Christ, Sam, are you telling me there’s fanfiction out there about _us_?!”

“Don’t go looking for it,” Sam warned. “It’s weird and creepy to read about yourself like that.”

Bucky leaned over and grabbed his tablet off the coffee table. “This I gotta see. Where do I find this stuff?”

And, shaking his head, Sam began to explain about the AO3. By the time he was done, Bucky was browsing hard. “Holy shit, Stevie,” he exclaimed. “There’s over _thirty thousand_ stories about you and Tony banging!”

“I don’t need to know that,” Steve replied, covering his ears. “La la la, I can’t hear you.”

“Oh my God!” Bucky exclaimed. “There’s over forty thousand about _you and me._ ” He looked up at the far wall. “Shit, Stevie, I think I might be sick.”

“Hey, I’m not that bad!” Steve exclaimed.

“Stevie. I love you, but I took baths with you when we were four. You’re like my little brother. That’s _gross._ ”

This time Sam laughed so hard he fell off the couch.


	8. Chapter 8

“Do you actually know where this base is?” Natasha asked Bucky over breakfast the next morning.

Bucky, mouth full of bacon, nodded. After swallowing, he said, “It’s north of Magadan in the Cherskiy mountains.”

“Well that’s nice and inaccessible,” Tony commented.

“Yeah, that’s the point,” Bucky agreed. “They didn’t want anybody stumbling on it by accident. It’s hard to reach from the ground without the right travel equipment, and back in the day you’d never have gotten there without passing one of the checkpoints. And if you didn’t hail HYDRA just right back then, you wouldn’t make it past the checkpoint.”

“No private entrances?” Sam asked.

Bucky shook his head. “It’s built into the side of the mountain. One way in, one way out.”

“Enough room to land a quinjet?” Clint wanted to know.

“Hmm,” Bucky considered. “Might be.”

“Okay,” Natasha said, “so we fly to Siberia. Then what?”

“Then we blow the hell out of the place and leave it a smoking hole in the ground,” Tony replied.

“Nice try,” Bucky told him. “The Soviets built that thing to withstand the launch of UR-100 rockets.”

“It launches nukes?!” Clint exclaimed.

“Close your mouth when you’re chewing; of course it launches nukes,” Natasha replied. “It’s only six or seven thousand kilometers from Magadan to Los Angeles; how better to destroy the US than by taking out New York or D.C. and Los Angeles at the same time?”

“What are the odds that there’s still a missile or two out there?” Sam wanted to know.

“One hundred percent,” Bucky and Natasha said in unison.

Sam grimaced. “And the chances of us, say, accidentally setting one off?”

There was a long pause in which Bucky and Natasha eyed one another nervously. Finally Tony spoke into the silence. “Maybe we _won’t_ blow it to hell, then.”

“Yeah, it might be a good idea to leave the place standing,” Bucky agreed. “You know. Just in case.”

“Does the Kremlin know it’s still there?” Steve asked, the first thing he’d said since asking for someone to pass the potatoes.

“Oh, yes,” Natasha said. “Nothing happens in Russia that the Kremlin doesn’t know about. That was true in the Soviet days and it’s even more true now under Putin.”

“Ah, good old Vladdy,” Tony murmured.

Bucky waved a hand. “Let’s not worry about politics. Let’s worry about what we’re dealing with in Siberia.”

“Right,” Tony said. “What _are_ we dealing with?”

“So, it’s essentially a bunker,” Bucky explained. “It… Hey, JARVIS, can I use this thing like one of Tony’s drawing boards?”

A square of smartglass at Bucky’s right hand lit up. “Just there, Sergeant,” JARVIS said, and a matching blank hologram opened up in the air near the head of the table.

“Thanks,” Bucky said. Then he began to sketch with his finger. “This is the general layout. This here, in the front, this is all offices and barracks and storage and things; the big stuff is all in the back. This central chamber here is where we - the Soldiers - were kept.”

“How are they… kept?” Sam asked.

Bucky’s mouth twisted in a faint, sardonic smile. “How are they stored?” he asked. When Sam shrugged, Bucky said, “In stasis chambers. Zola used cryo, but when they made stasis work, we started going in those instead. Waking up was still a nightmare, but at least it wasn’t a _frozen_ nightmare.”

 Natasha snorted softly.

“Anyway, there’s eight chambers. Only half of them will have anyone in them; one of them was mine and two are empty.”

“What are we doing with them?” Sam asked.

“Putting them down like the rabid dogs they are,” Natasha said firmly.

“In cold blood?” Steve objected.

“It’s not cold blood if you know what they’re capable of,” Bucky replied. “I don’t like the idea of killing them helpless any more than you do, but I also know I’m no match for them. Josef almost killed me once.”

“Who _are_ these people?” Clint demanded.

Bucky sighed. “HYDRA’s most elite death squad. They had more kills than anyone in HYDRA history - including me - and that was _before_ the serum.”

“They all turn out like you?” Sam asked.

“Worse,” Bucky said grimly.

“And Karpov, he could control them?” Steve wanted to know.

Bucky shrugged. “Barely, but it was enough. For awhile.”

“They’re that bad?” Tony asked.

“They’re that bad,” Bucky confirmed. “They speak 30 languages, can hide in plain sight, infiltrate, assassinate, destabilize. They can take a whole country down in one night. You'd never see them coming.”

“They’ve got to be eliminated,” Natasha said quietly into the subsequent silence. “Before anyone else can get their hands on them.”

The rest of breakfast was finished in a tense, unhappy silence, the hologram of Bucky’s drawing hanging in the air to taunt them.

~*~

They decided to take off late; they could sleep on the flight over and be (mostly) well rested in the morning to take care of whatever needed taking care of in the bunker. They carefully did not say to one another that the plan was to essentially murder five people - however awful those people were. Sam was privately pretty sure that if anyone actually said that out loud, the whole thing would crumble. So nobody said it.

The flight would take about thirteen hours; they planned their departure so that they would arrive midmorning. “Enough time for the sun to come up, such as it is,” Bucky said. “I don’t wanna be stumbling around out there in the dark, and I don’t know where the switches are for the floodlights.”

Once they were out of New York airspace, Clint turned the flying over to JARVIS and the Avengers assembled in the jet’s common area just in time to hear Sam speak. “It’s easy,” he said to Steve. “A, my name is Adam, I’m from Alabama, and I like to eat apples.”

“B my name is Barry,” Clint interjected. “I’m from Boston, and I like to eat beans.”

“Oh, this is too easy,” Natasha replied. “C my name is Carrie, I’m from California, and I like to eat crabs.”

“Now you’re getting it,” Sam praised her.

“D my name is Daniel,” Bucky offered. “I’m from… Detroit, and I like to eat… uh. Donuts.”

“That was kind of a tough one,” Tony admitted. “I couldn’t think of anything. E my name is Eric, I’m from Edmonton, and I like to eat eggs.”

All eyes turned to Steve, who nodded and grinned. “F my name is Frank,” he said. “I’m from Flatbush and I like to eat fish.”

“Perfect,” Sam said, laughing. “See? It’s not hard.”

“Okay, but what do we do when we get to Z?” Steve asked.

“Start over,” Sam said, just as Clint replied “Play punch-buggy.”

“Oh hell no,” Natasha interjected. “Even if we _were_ within sight of any Volkswagens I would not play punch-buggy with you assholes.”

“No fun,” Clint complained, but he kept his hands to himself.

They played a number of road trip games before getting bored, then they watched a movie. And then Clint said, “You know what I just thought of? Snacks.”

“Do we even have any snacks?” Tony asked. “I mean, I know there’s a fully equipped kitchen with _actual food_ and things, because I designed the interior of this plane myself, but are there _snacks_?”

“There are always snacks wherever Clint is,” Natasha said, laughing.

“Road trip snacks!” Clint exclaimed. “Shit! Barnes, have you ever had Funyuns?”

There was a moment’s pause before Bucky replied, “What in the actual fuck is a Funyun?”

“Oh, _hell_ ,” Sam said softly, and Clint scrambled toward the kitchen.

Bucky looked at Steve, who shrugged in response. Mystified, he sat back on the sofa and waited; moments later, Clint returned, carrying three plastic bags that turned out to be full of an assortment of what apparently passed for food in Clint’s world. “Should we start with sweet, savory, crunchy, or Slim Jim?”

“You promised me Funyuns,” Bucky pointed out.

“Funyuns it is!”

Very shortly, a number of new words entered both Bucky and Steve’s vocabularies. These were words like _cheese powder_ and _partially hydrogenated corn syrup_ and _no actual onions were harmed in the making of._ Bucky discovered that he actually liked Slim Jims and subsequently hoarded all of them; much to his own horror, Steve found himself truly enjoying a Twinkie, despite the fact that it made the inside of his mouth feel greasy afterward.

“How have you not eaten this stuff before?” Tony asked Steve around a mouthful of Sno-Ball. “I mean, Terminator I can understand, but you’ve been alive in this century for actual years.”

Steve shrugged. “Never really had the desire,” he admitted, examining a Zebra Cake. “I mean, let’s be honest, most of it doesn’t even _look_ like food.”

“Man’s got a point,” Sam said, offering a bag of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos to Bucky.

Very shortly, Sam found himself on the receiving end of a betrayed expression. “How could you do that to me?” Bucky mumbled, gulping down a mouthful of Mountain Dew Code Red. “I thought we were friends!”

“I didn’t know you were a wuss,” Sam replied, digging into the bag and dropping several Cheetos into his own mouth.

Bucky shuddered, taking another swallow. “Also, this drink is disgusting and I want, like, a case of it.”

“That’s the whole thing about road trip food,” Clint agreed, opening a bag of beef jerky. “It’s all disgusting and you end up wanting tons of it.” He poked through the bags. “Still can’t believe I didn’t get pork rinds.”

“I’ll pass on anything with a name like that,” Steve said, shaking his head.

Natasha laughed. “No, pork rinds are actually good,” she said. “It’s the skin of the - ” She paused, taking in the look on Steve’s face. “Never mind. You don’t actually want to know.”

“That is correct,” Steve agreed.

“I remember these,” Bucky said, holding up a bag of circus peanuts. “These are disgusting in the bad way and I will not be hoodwinked.”

“Oh, give me those,” Steve said, making grabby hands. “I love those.”

Bucky tossed them to him. “You’re a disgusting person,” he said.

“Love you, too, Buck.”

~*~

It was snowing hard in the Cherskiy mountains when the quinjet landed.  The wings folded neatly in, and the team began suiting up. It was decided unanimously that Clint should stay behind and keep the jet ready in case a quick exit should be needed for any reason; everyone else pulled on body armor (or, in Tony’s case, a suit) and loaded up with weapons.

Bucky had to use his left hand to scrape snow and ice off the keypad by the door, but once it was clear, he punched in a code and the door - in fits and starts - slid open.

They pass two by two into a dark tunnel, Bucky taking point. “There’s no way anyone’s still here,” he said, but his voice was hushed anyway, possibly to try and disguise the way it shook as they moved farther and farther down. Finally, the dark tunnel opened into a wide, almost cavernous space. The walls were lined with boxes - records, Tony noted idly, as he examined the boxes closest to him, all labeled in Russian. The majority of the space, though, was taken up by the stasis chambers.

As Bucky had said, there were eight of them, and they were lined up four and four facing each other. Each one of the occupied chambers glowed from inside with a golden-yellow light that illuminated the forms within; three men and two women, all with their eyes closed, looking like they were asleep.

Between the lines of chambers, at the far end of the room, sat what looked like a massive dentist’s chair, if the dentist was a sadist: there were heavy restraints on both chair arms, and a massive set of arms that were clearly meant to drop down and form some kind of halo around a person’s head. When Steve spoke, his voice shook with repressed fury. “That’s the chair they talked about in the files, isn’t it?”

Bucky swallowed hard and nodded. “That’s the original one, yeah. There were three others.” He paused, and there was a little satisfaction in his voice when he said “This is the last one.”

“Well,” Tony said carefully, “what do you say we make it a pile of slag?”  And one of his hand repulsors began to whine.

“Yeah,” Bucky said, stepping aside. “Yeah, do it. I wanna see it blow.”

And blow it did; the repulsor beam took it right where the back joined the seat, and in one sustained blast destroyed it. The halo parts went flying as the chair itself exploded; the base was reduced to slag.

There was silence for a moment as the Avengers took in the remainder of the damage. Then Natasha stepped forward, looking up at the nearest occupied stasis chamber.  “All right,” she said. “It’s time to deal with these. Anyone who has an objection to me putting a round in each head, it’s time to speak now.”

“I have an objection,” said a voice from behind them, and it was followed by the sound of many feet and several guns cocking. “I suggest all of you raise your hands very slowly and put them behind your heads, then turn around and face me.”

When they did, they came face to face with Thaddeus Ross.


	9. Chapter 9

At gunpoint, they were herded back up the tunnel and into a disused conference room. Clint was already there under guard, but he did have a piece of good news. “I locked the jet when they dragged me out,” he said as the others all sat down, staring at the giant skull-and-tentacles logo painted on the table. “Nobody gets back in without Tony authorizing it from the suit.”

“Good move,” Steve praised him. “Very smart.”

“Yeah, well, I didn’t want anybody getting a look at our movie collection. Just the sheer number of musicals in there would be embarrassing to _anybody._ ”

They engaged in pointless small talk for a few minutes before the door opened again and Ross stepped inside. “I want to know everything there is to know about this place and those people. And if you tell me enough to make me happy, you _might_ get to go back to New York.”

“Oh, we’ll go back to New York either way,” Tony replied. “But we’ll tell you what we think you need to know.”

“They’re dangerous,” Bucky said simply. “You know how you’ve heard about the Winter Soldier? Well, it wasn’t just me. It’s also them. And they’re a lot more dangerous than me.”

Ross scoffed. “There’s nothing more dangerous than a rogue abomination,” he said simply. “And this room is full of them.”

“You want to talk about rogue abominations?” Bucky demanded. “Open one of those chambers and find out what that really means. You can’t use them, Ross. They’re dangerous.”

“Fortunately for you,” Ross replied, “I have no intention of using them. One missing weapon is bad enough.” He looked over at Tony. “Tell me, Stark, where is the Hulk?”

“ _Bruce Banner,_ ” Tony stressed the name, “is on walkabout. He’ll be back eventually. When he gets back, if you want to talk to him, you can make an appointment through his office secretary.”

Ross scoffed. “It’s fine. We’ll find him.”

“Good luck,” Clint snorted.

Ross’s mustache twitched. “I want to know more about those soldiers in there.”

“What do you want to know?” Steve asked, taking on the role of The Reasonable One.

“Everything,” Ross repeated.

“The craziest one is called Josef,” Bucky replied. “He’s the one that almost killed me.” He took a deep breath, deciding quickly what he should say. “Before the serum, they were the most elite death squad HYDRA had. They’re loyalists. They volunteered for the super serum process. Two of them died from it; the rest of them succeeded. They’re as enhanced as Steve - more so than me. They got the real deal serum from Erskine’s work; I got Zola’s knockoff.”

“So they’re as powerful as Captain America?”

Bucky nodded. “At least.” He smirked. “You want to be responsible for five deranged Captain HYDRAs running around?”

“Hmm.” Ross considered him, mustache twitching some more. “As much as I hate to admit it, Barnes, you may have a point. I guess I’ll settle for you.” He walked over to the door and opened it. To someone in the hall, he said, “Eliminate them.”

“Yes, sir,” said a man’s voice from the hallway, and then came the sound of footsteps walking away.

  
Ross shut the door again, then turned back to the Avengers.

Steve’s eyes had gone narrow. “What do you mean, you’ll settle for Bucky?”

“You don’t let a rabid dog just wander the streets, Captain; surely you can understand my position.”

“He’s not a rabid dog,” Steve snarled. “He’s a recovering POW.”

“Sell that line to somebody else,” Ross replied. “I’m not buying it.”

From outside, there came the muffled sound of gunfire; five individual shots echoed through the building.  Sam winced. Then Tony spoke. “And what exactly is it that you think you’re going to do with Barnes?”

“He’s going to the Raft along with his friend Zemo,” Ross replied. “And he’s going to be grateful he gets life and not a bullet to the back of the head.”

“Oh, is _that_ what you think is going to happen?” Clint asked softly.

There was a moment of silence before Ross said, “What the hell is that supposed to mean, Barton?”

Tony chuckled. “Only that this entire conversation has been recorded and is streaming live to my AI back in New York,” he said. “Try to take Barnes and the whole world gets to see the U.S. Secretary of State spearheading the extraordinary rendition of an American soldier and POW who’s done nothing since his return but try to reintegrate into society. Hell, this is a guy who talks about his trauma therapy on Instagram. You think that’s going to go over well with the general public?”

Steve smirked. “You’ll find yourself in front of a Congressional hearing before you get back to the States,” he said. “Plus I’ll be filing civil and criminal charges on Bucky’s behalf. You’ll be so buried in legislation and international humiliation that you’ll be _begging_ us to take Bucky back and prominently display him so the world knows you gave up and backed down. After the way you played out that fiasco with the Hulk - didn’t you lose the war of public opinion that time, too? Something about footage that proved you’d released a monster of your own and that one was the one that did all the damage?”

Ross’s face had gone the color of a tomato by the time Steve was done. “What do you intend to do, then?”

“Well, since you eliminated those soldiers, there’s nothing left for us to do here,” Natasha replied. “So we’re going to take our jet and go back to New York. And you’re going to leave us alone, or this whole conversation is going to go out the same way those Insight files went. And you know I’ll do it. I’m not afraid of public opinion the way you are.”

Ross genuinely looked like he was on the verge of a stroke; Sam was almost concerned for him. Finally, though, he realized that he had no choice but to back down. “Don’t think you’ve heard the last of me,” he threatened as the Avengers left the room together, immediately surrounding Bucky in the hallway as they headed back toward the jet.

“We would never be so lucky,” Tony replied.

Once they were out in the snow and had passed around Ross’s aircraft, Tony gave JARVIS the order to unlock the jet; they scrambled inside and closed the hatch before Ross could get any ideas. Clint threw himself into the pilot’s seat and had them in the air in under five minutes; meanwhile, as the others started stripping out of armor and body armor, Natasha began sending lightning-fast text messages.

“Who are you messaging?” Sam asked her.

“A friend in the Kremlin,” she replied. “They’ll be interested to know that the U.S. Secretary of State is nosing around a secret base in Siberia. If Ross wants to get out of there without causing an international incident, he’d better leave about ten minutes ago. But he won’t; he’ll be too interested in all those records.”

“Oh, that’s going to be fun,” Steve said. “Still, can even the Russians be trusted with those records?”

“I’m calling in a favor,” Natasha replied. “Those records will be ash by the end of today.”

“That’s why it’s useful to have the Black Widow on your team,” Clint called from the cockpit.  He finished putting orders and directions into the autopilot, then turned the jet over to JARVIS. Coming back to the main common space, he started stripping his own body armor off. “A my name is Andy,” he said. “I’m from Arkansas and I like to eat anchovies.”

~*~

The picture was a simple one: a tiny reddish succulent in a too-large ceramic pot, sitting on a little table in front of a north-facing window. _It needs a name,_ the caption read. _Suggestions?_

Bucky sat back on the sofa, watching the name suggestions roll in from his followers. From the kitchen, he could hear Steve and Sam putting together dinner, and the TV was playing a space documentary with the sound on mute.  It had been ten days since they left Siberia, ten days in which Thaddeus Ross lost his position as Secretary of State and nearly ended up in a Russian prison; ten days in which Bruce Banner came home from his walkabout and Thor returned from Asgard; ten days during which Bucky and Sam finally got around to making those ribs and cornbread.

Now Bucky had a succulent - a gift from Mr. Thornton, the same neighbor who had planted the catnip, and given after the said Mr. Thornton had discovered Bucky in the alley feeding the cats.

“Hey, plants are a hobby, right?” Bucky said to the house in general. “Like, I could say I do plants, right?”

“Gardening is a hobby, yeah,” Sam replied, leaning around the doorway. “You thinking about getting more plants?”

“Only if I don’t kill this one,” Bucky said. “But it counts as a hobby for, like, self-care?”

“If you enjoy it, sure,” Sam replied. “Wait and see if you enjoy it before you decide to call yourself a gardener.”

“Makes sense,” Bucky replied.

~*~

“And I haven’t killed it yet,” Bucky finished. “And it’s been two weeks.”

“That’s a good start,” his therapist said. “It’s good to have things to care about. I’d been thinking about suggesting a dog - a therapy dog would be great for you - but starting with a plant is even better. You have to be responsible for it, since it can’t water itself, but you also have to make sure you don’t _over_ do it, because succulents can drown. Learning to find that balance will be good for you, too, you know.”

Bucky nodded. “Yeah, balance is important. I’ve been working on that. It’s still hard, finding ways to fill the time.”

“Have you thought any more about volunteering somewhere?”

Bucky bit his lip. “The library website says they’re looking for people to help teach reading.”

“To children?”

“To adults,” Bucky said. “People come in who need help learning to read and they need people to, I guess, to be read to for practice and things.”

“That would be excellent,” his therapist said. “I definitely think you should try something like that.”

Bucky nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “I think I’m gonna.”

~*~

Steve and Sam came dragging in about the same time one Thursday evening, both exhausted. Steve wanted nothing more than to flop down on the couch and curl up in Sam’s arms; it had been a tiring day with a rough therapy session and he just wanted to veg. But when he came in, he could hear the TV on in the living room - it sounded like _Wheel of Fortune_ \- and he could smell something very delicious.

“What is that?” Steve asked as he made his way toward the kitchen.

Bucky looked up from the stove and grinned. “Hey,” he said. “It’s a barbecued pork loin and macaroni and cheese and cornbread.”

“With baking powder this time, I hope,” Sam teased, following Steve into the kitchen.

Bucky picked up the Calumet can and gave it a shake in Sam’s direction. “Double checked it this time,” he said, grinning.

“Well, it all smells amazing,” Steve said. “So are you adding cooking to your repertoire of hobbies?”

“Maybe. It’s kind of fun sometimes but I don’t think it’s something I want to do all the time.”

“Understandable,” Sam agreed. “That’s what box mixes and delivery are for.”

Bucky pointed a finger at Sam, grinning. “Exactly.”

Steve went to the sink to wash his hands. “How can I help?”

“Set the table,” Bucky said. “The cornbread will be done in about - ” An alarm beeped, and Bucky reached out to silence it. “- now.” He reached into the oven and pulled the pan out; both Steve and Sam went _oooh_ and hurried to get the table set up.

When dinner - perfect and delicious - was over, Steve and Sam did the washing up while Bucky checked on the laundry, and then the three of them retired to the living room. “Okay, now that we’ve finished watching _The X-Files_ , you guys need to be introduced to the glorious chop-sockiness that is _Xena_.”

“Oh, I saw an episode of that,” Bucky said. “It’s syndicated on one of the higher-number channels and I was flipping through.”

“Then you know what kind of ridiculousness you’re in for,” Sam said, flipping the television on and navigating to Amazon Prime. “Steve’s going to love this.”

“He’d better,” Bucky replied. “If he knows what’s good for him.”

“Hey,” Steve protested. “I like good TV.”

“Yeah, but you wouldn’t know good romance if it bit you in the ass,” Bucky replied.

Steve, still mad about the whole Mulder and Scully thing, sniffed. “Just because your ship turned out to be canon…”

Sam dropped a hand over Steve’s mouth. “Don’t worry,” he said to Bucky. “If he’s not shipping Xena and Gabrielle by the third episode we’ll just dump him out in the back yard and read fanfiction by ourselves.”

“Sounds good,” Bucky replied. “Now turn the damn show on.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for sticking with me, readers! I hope you all enjoyed reading as much as I enjoyed writing.
> 
> Make sure to subscribe to the series - I have some one-shots coming down the pipe for this 'verse. ;)


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